On the first day of our Digital Media Production Studio, we did a visual storytelling exercise. We recalled details for the prompts “car” or “vehicle” and also “food.”

We worked two minutes writing down a list of the cars we could think of from our life. Then we spent another several minutes writing down the details of the most memorable car from our list. Who is with you. What do you feel. What is the day like? What is above, below, beside you etc.

After writing down the details we could remember, we spent six minutes writing down the story that we recalled using our memories as building blocks.

We then took turns reading our stories while the listeners drew spirals without looking at the reader.

The final step was to draw a scene from the story we just heard. We repeated this process over and over until we had heard seven stories and made seven images. One person had to leave early and only made three, so that is why one stack of images is shorter. These pictures are arranged in order the stories were told and when you look at these side by side, you can compare the similarities and differences.

What a great way to start a new semester! (Hat tip to Lynda Barry’s Writing the Unthinkable workshop.)

January 17th marked the 29th anniversary of the first day of Operation Desert Storm. I know, I know, it was January 16th in the US, but in the gulf, it was already the morning of the 17th. To celebrate, I made a couple of drawings of an incident that happened on my ship while I was there. After the cease-fire, the ammunition magazine of turret number 2 was flooded. I had to lead a team into the bowels of the ship, all the way down to Deck 7, to dry out some of our fire control system wiring that had been soaked with sea water. Interestingly, the insulation on our wiring was from the 1940s, a time in which plastic had not been invented yet, so each wire was wrapped in cotton fabric braided material. Needless to say, the salt water caused a bunch of short circuits. My team had to blow dry each wire and check it for shorts. It took us many hours to get everything dried out and the hardest part was the fact that we were crouched down in a dark, damp crawl space, not really made for human habitation. It was only about four feet high, if I remember right, not even big enough for a child to stand upright in.

The first drawing is taken from a YouTube video that I posted of us going in and out of the crawl space. The second is simply from memory of what it was like to be in that space.

I made 3 color sketches, starting with yellow, then re-drawing with orange, and finally redrawing the same picture with blue. The final step is to ink it in.

This is a new technique for me to try that I learned about via Lynda Barry’s Instagram.

I think I spent about four hours doing these two drawings. If I follow Lynda B’s example, I am still ten drawings and 20 hours away from making a dozen pictures of the same scene. With school starting next week, it might take me a couple of weeks to get that done. We’ll see…