Short Story Project

Duration: October – November, 2020

Nearing the end of the Fall 2020 semester, I was expected to consider the trajectory of my work from freshman year until now and develop a creative personal project that I would then present on the last day of class. Much of my previous work has been focused on the idea of storytelling, the activity of telling a story or tale, so taking this concept literally. I decided to tell the story of Kongjui and Patjui in the form of a webtoon, a comic specifically made for mobile devices.

The story of Kongjui and Patjui is a traditional Korean fairytale about a young girl named Kongjui who meets her new step-mother and step-sister Patjui, after the death of her birth mother. Left alone without the assistance of her father, Kongjui is constantly bullied by her new family. After a series of hardships, Kongjui escapes her difficult family with the help of a kind and rich young man and they live happily ever after.

As you can tell, this fairytale similar thematic elements to the Western fairytale Cinderella.

To start, I researched character styles. Initially looking at Korean short animation films from Chungkang Animation School. I specifically looked for films with 2D characters that were simple and easy to replicate in different frames and positions, as I would be doing the same in my webtoon.

Following that, I made a mood board. Mood boards are an important part of my creative process because I like to have – and need – tangible representations of what I’m trying to accomplish while I work. I usually use images from Pinterest to build my mood board. For this project, I looked for photographs of adults and children wearing traditional Korean clothing (called hanbok or 한복) and traditional Korean homes (called hanok or 한옥).

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As I continued my research, I came up with an idea. What if I used a mix of photographs and hand-drawn elements to create my characters and backgrounds, rather than drawing them all by hand? I intended to create something similar to paper-cut art. This idea stemmed from a previous project I had done freshman year. It was a mixed-media project, in which I overlaid various paper textures and images to create characters for a Japanese folktale I was telling. After speaking to my professor about this idea and getting the go-ahead, I began researching paper-cut art and artists. Artists like Alice Lindstrom, Martin Hakke, Morgana Wallace, and Ed Young (author of the children’s book “The Monkey King”) provided me with a lot of inspiration.

Having a mix of images and hand-drawn elements, my project was complete.

As you can see, the webtoon is lacking its conclusion. The explanation for this is a combination of poor time management skills and it being intentional. In the original plot, Kongjui marries a wealthy man and moves away from her family after much torment. However, I decided to change the ending to something that a “modern” woman might do. I understand that Kongjui’s decision to marry was influenced by culture and the time period this fairytale was made, but I wanted to take control of Kongjui’s fate in my own version of the story. However, I couldn’t decide what would happen in the end and eventually I had to leave it blank given the project due date was quickly approaching.