Wisdom Tales From Around the World is a collection of tall tales collected and rewritten by Heather Forest. The book has 50 stories from all parts of the world.The book is called Wisdom Tales because she hopes people can learn little bits of wisdom from the stories. Every single story has a moral. I read every single story in the book even though it was not assigned.  I thought the book was very interesting, easy to read, and enjoyable.

This is a comic I made for Language Arts class. It is based on a wisdom tale called The Smuggler. I chose this story because it was fun and I liked it. The story is about an inspector who encounters a smuggler with his donkey. The inspector checked the smuggler for contraband but all he found was hay. The smuggler kept coming every day until the inspector retired, but one day he ran into the smuggler in the market and asked him what he had been smuggling. The smuggler replied  “donkeys”. The moral is that the truth is sometimes in plain sight.

I made this comic using Comic Life 3 and Sketchbook. Comic Life 3 is an app that can be used for making comics. When you create a comic, you are given a set of layout templates to choose from or you can create your own. Once you have a layout  you draw an image on a separate drawing app such as Sketchbook or Paper53 and import it to your comic.  A good tip for Comic Life is: don’t mess around with the reshape tool because I messed around with it and  wasn’t able to get my comic back to normal. The reshape tool is a tool in Comic Life 3 that allows you to reshape boxes. Sketchbook is a drawing app. A good tip for Sketchbook is: to move things around make sure you are on the layer you want to move around, go to transform,   click on the drawing and move it around. Learning how to move things around on Sketchbook took me a while to figure out and was very helpful. 

Brittain Peck, an artist, came to my school in December and spoke to middle school students about tips for drawing. Brittain Peck has created murals, illustrated comics, done sports branding, and many other illustrations. One of the most important tips for comics is to keep your drawings simple, you can use simple shapes to express an idea clearly with some context. 

Overall, this unit was really interesting. It was fun to draw the comic and hear from someone that does this for a living. The Wisdom Tales was full of stories that would appeal to a wide audience.