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June 28, 2022
Finals Comic Design: the taboos surrounding pregnancy
Anastasia did the four-year higher professional course in Comic Design at the ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design in Zwolle. In the video below, she tells us more about her finals: “The theme of my finals are the taboos around pregnancy. What you experience when you’re pregnant, and not necessarily what you see on the media or what you hear from your mom. It’s about the violence that pregnant women experience during delivery. The miscarriages. But also what a midwife experiences.”
Multiple perspectives
She explains that her project mainly tackles psychological violence, such as not being fully in charge when it comes to making decisions regarding your own delivery. But she didn’t want to exclude the side of the midwives. “While I was writing my story, I thought that I shouldn’t only talk about the mother. It doesn’t feel right to leave out the other side of this story. Because a midwife also experiences things that we don’t necessarily think about. I wanted to also tell her story.”
What I like about comic design is the fact that I can convey feelings and information through images and text.
Book of nine chapters
Anastasia’s biggest progression during the last four years is that she now knows exactly what her plan is, what her story is, and how she wants to show it through images and text. “What I like about comic design is the fact that I can convey feelings and information through images and text. I think comics work well when it comes to conveying feelings that would be difficult to describe through merely words,” she says. After she graduates, her plan is to turn her 6-pages comic into a book that consists of nine chapters.
About the Comic Design course
The four-year higher professional course in Comic Design at ArtEZ in Zwolle is the only higher professional education course for comic illustrators in the Netherlands. You are taught by prominent comic illustrators, such as Hanco Kolk. You get direct access to the (international) work field and you get the option to do a semester exchange with foreign partner academies. You also get to work with other students doing different courses at ArtEZ Academy Art & Design. After you graduate, you can get started as an independent designer, as a designer at a design company, or work for other organisations in the media and entertainment industry.
