What feelings do

What you need:

Post-It Notes
Paper
Pen or pencil or whatever
Feelings

Instructions:

1. How have you been feeling? What’s been going on with you? Pick a topic that’s been on your mind lately.

2. Now make a list of actions that describe what your topic “does”.
   For example, if your topic is illness (which is the topic I picked for my example), you could say that illness grinds, drains, traps, destroys, breaks down, erodes, etc…

3. Now pick an action (or a few) and list other things that perform that action, or situations that exemplify that action.
   Like, using some of the examples above, here are Clothes wear out, things left outside in the weather erode, relationships break down, tolerance for behaviors erode, fires destroy, patience erodes, sand paper wears down, ropes trap, etc…

4. Pick one of those things or situations and use that for the imagery of your comic. For your text, write about your topic directly. Ideally, you want the images to act as a visual metaphor for your text.
   Note: When I did this exercise, I found that that I needed to add something other than the thing/situation (in this case, myself) into the visuals to create some visual diversity.

5. Optional last step!
   Change things up at the end so you don’t end up with a boring comic. Ideally, the change should be a progression or escalation of your topic or metaphor, something that adds new or unexpected meaning.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Thoughts:

I’ve always struggled to teach visual metaphor. In the classroom, it’s easy to come up with bad metaphors, or metaphors everyone has heard before, but hard to find fresh, clear ones. No one wants a bad metaphor, and old metaphors, no matter how clever they were the first time, just lose their vividness after a while. The first person to say, “my love is an ocean” was probably a genius, but all it illicits now are eye rolls. Better to have no metaphor at all than a crappy one, IMHO.

But I won’t give up trying to teach it! I’ll keep trying because visual metaphor is an incredibly powerful visual storytelling tool and encountering a good metaphor is like seeing a unicorn.
Or maybe seeing a unicorn eat a squirrel?
Or poop an ice cream?
Or… balls! Metaphors are really tricky.

I probably should have said that visual metaphor IS a unicorn pooping balls of squirrel ice cream, but as far as I can tell, there isn’t really much of a difference between a visual metaphor and a visual analogy.