Illstrated Poem

Assignment #1: Illustrated Poem Assignment

Choose a poem of your liking to illustrate. Try to find one with imagery that really resonates with you, not just the first one that springs to mind. It can be contemporary, historical, solemn, comedic, romantic – whatever, just as long as you could find something about it that would inspire an illustration. Don’t include the final poem in the illustration, but bring a copy of it for our reference during the critique. Since this assignment is pretty open and general, use it as a means of figuring out what type of imagery really resonates with you.

** I'll be bringing tons of poetry books in all different genres to class so the students will have tons to read and sift through. (the usual suspects like: Robert Frost, Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Sexton, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Shel Silverstein, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Saul Williams). You can use the internet if you can't find any poetry books around you.

Media: anything you want as long as your final is in color.
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I chose to illustrate the poem "A Boy Names Sue" by Shel Silverstein
but sense it also a great Johnny Cash song with the exact same lyrics you can listen to it here

My idea for this poem came from the idea of what Sue's childhood must have been like with a name like that. I thought about it deeper, back when "Sue" was a little boy and his classmates maybe have just start to get mean at the age around 8-11. How he probably started to get the beginning effects of the name his Dad gave him, so he'd still be a little soft about it. I pictured a kid on the lonesome playground at sunset silhouetted with a bat over his shoulder(probably protecting himself with it), with a ironic smiley face shirt on and an adorable tough but" on the verge of crying" face on. Here is my mock-up:

Here is the colored version: