THE HARLEM
SUNSET
A project for a publication design course
at The University of Washington
December, 2017
This project was for a publication design class taught by Jayme Yen, and has morphed into a personal project of mine that is ongoing. The Harlem Sunset is a graphic novel project that my friend Emily Barr and I developed in high school. It recounts a story about an Italian mobster and a New York beat cop in 1920s New York. Two parallel stories take place in the graphic novel, the cop's point-of-view in the visuals and panels, and the mobster's written in the narrative text (written by Emily Barr).
From the beginning, I knew this would be a big project. I set my mind from the beginning on printing this on tabloid newsprint. This large-scale format would give the story a larger-than-life feel which would mirror the characters' viewpoints. Since I had two parallel stories, the newspaper format also helped me combine the two seamlessly since a newspaper is both a text and visual medium. I drew all of the images with pen and edited them in Photoshop before bringing them into the work. The linework that ink provides is rougher and has a grungy feel that fits with the noir-esque texture of the work. I wanted to study the interplay of text and image and how they can both tell the same story with a different feel, hence how some text bleeds into image and vice versa.
From the beginning, I knew this would be a big project. I set my mind from the beginning on printing this on tabloid newsprint. This large-scale format would give the story a larger-than-life feel which would mirror the characters' viewpoints. Since I had two parallel stories, the newspaper format also helped me combine the two seamlessly since a newspaper is both a text and visual medium. I drew all of the images with pen and edited them in Photoshop before bringing them into the work. The linework that ink provides is rougher and has a grungy feel that fits with the noir-esque texture of the work. I wanted to study the interplay of text and image and how they can both tell the same story with a different feel, hence how some text bleeds into image and vice versa.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/468ae10480d6c0a82a7a93d79e36cdb399670db8d829838068060d5052ef2eeb/Harlem_Sunset.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ebe27b4800902e72739ee751c5593d1090ea3514fcb3ee00c93813788e5ccd01/Panel_2.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/02c494a33d0e75a5c8287a49165ba6dfdcb413d7b5e34966306fd88c234dbbba/Panel_2.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/677d5756b4b6f105d557f469285a5082103941b96620ab3b83ae0ccd524ebc7e/Panel_1.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/778911653e0ce8cef3604ebfdd78f12bd097639feb8b205b12e4f4749d594215/Panel_3.jpg)