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.
