Do you like wisdom? Do you like hearing about how wisdom can be turned into a comic? I didn’t think so. At least about that second one. But If you like both things, then I’ve got the blog post for you! In this post, I will be talking about how I read, converted into a comic, and made a blog post about a wisdom tale!

So, if you’re unfamiliar, we do this unit in Language Arts where we read a bunch of these stories from this book called Wisdom Tales from Around the World. We do summaries on each one. This year, we did 20 total wisdom tales. I picked my favorite and a popular choice, The Smuggler.

You might be quite underwhelmed by my  drawings, and I do not blame you for feeling that way. You might also be able to notice that I actually only drew the smuggler once, and that I only drew the donkey twice. I saved about two hours of drawing time just by adding photos of the characters. That is how I ended up drawing absolutely nothing on the final panel. I only had to spend 30 minutes on redrawing characters.

I drew this comic on Sketchbook, a drawing app with a lot of great features and utensils. For example, the ability to lasso and move objects. Sketchbook is a completely free and amazing app that I totally recommend it! Now, the drawing app that I will not recommend is Paper By Fifty-Three. I have tried Paper By Fifty-Three, and I disliked it. It has half of the features that Sketchbook has, and you need a premium subscription to still not get as many features a Sketchbook.

The other app that I used to make the comic is Comic Life. Comic life is a very useful app for people aspiring to make comics for a living. The app contains multiple templates for making you comic, and multiple fonts for your titles. You also have access to multiple speech bubbles that you can use to make your comic perfect. Another feature on top of that is that you can put your pictures into your comic by looking at your photos and selecting the picture that you want.

We had someone come and help us with strategies for  drawing our comics called Brittain Peck. He’s an illustrator and makes drawings about all sorts of things. He does murals, illustrates advertisements, you name it! He talked to us about how you can look at different things different ways. An often times overlooked part about art is that you don’t actually need to be super detailed with your work to make it look good. You can just arrange shapes in a nice style to make a great drawing.

The moral of this story is that something could be hidden in plain sight. The summary of this story is:  One day, a wise smuggler came to the border connecting two lands. He was stopped by a guard. The guard searched through all of the hay on the donkey, but couldn’t find anything. In the end, the thing the smuggler was smuggling was a donkey. This story was my favorite because of its comical aspect. The “think outside of the box” aspect was perfect when it met the story line. Would you pick this story too?

I worked really hard on this project, and I’ve got the blog post, comic, and slideshow to show for it. It was really fun working together on this project, especially the comic part. I hope you enjoyed this post and look at others on my page. I have plans to make a school paper, and have updates every week on what’s going on at Durham Academy. Thanks!