Exploration Investigation #3

This piece centers around a small newspaper from a fictional town in Idaho, in the year 1903. For this piece, I chose to create fictional local news on the front page and used actual national news from May 5th of 1903. The articles about the Panama Canal and the Chicago White stockings committing 12 errors are things that actually happened, but the spelling bee and obituary are fake. I tried to create a mix of horrible things and mundane and boring things that I feel might have been mixed together, such as an article about an infamous murderer being brought to justice while appearing next to an article about Mad Cow disease. I tried to create believable advertisements, for a dry goods store, a butcher shop, and a sporting goods store, and tried to place them next to articles that related to their subject matter. When I mentioned the Barnum and Bailey Circus on the front page, I added an advertisement for that very circus on the back page, trying to create a believable fictional world within one newspaper. I really enjoyed this part of the project and would love to try storytelling through fake journalism in the future.

To create this piece, I used 18 by 24 newsprint, which I folded in half both ways to create the folds of a newspaper. I used a graphite pencil to layout the page and to write in the text and heading font. I then used Micron technical pens and a Fuji brush pen to add ink over the text and drawings.

My process did not fluctuate during this piece. I would stare off into space, come up with an article idea, write it, and then repeat. I did this until the front and back of my piece were filled. I tried to incorporate something a little bit funny at the end, as I was fed up writing seriously so I threw in a three-sentence article about a kid who won the local spelling bee for spelling sobriety when his dad was the town drunk. How hilarious.