Seth Boyes joined the Dickinson County News staff in March of 2017. In his first week at the DCN, he covered a train derailment near Graettinger. The tankers carrying ethanol burst into flames. Seth's photo of the event won first place for Best Breaking News photo at the 2018 Iowa Newspaper Association Convention and Trade Show. Since, Seth has won nearly a dozen awards for writing, photography and multimedia content. Seth graduated from Iowa State University in 2009 with a degree in Integrated Studio Arts. His original cartoons run regularly in the Spencer Daily Reporter and the DCN. Both he and his wife Janet hail from Clear Lake and have come to expect summers to be full of the hustle and bustle of tourists and visitors.

Straight-ticket

Posted Thursday, October 11, 2018, at 3:29 PM

This one seemed simple from the start, and it was - but it had some challenges nonetheless. It took a little more than an hour to complete (full disclosure: I had to go back a couple weeks later when the Iowa Secretary of State mentioned this will be the first year Iowa ballots won't have the straight-ticket option, and you can see the change in the animation below). I was very satisfied with the color palette. The simple composition multiplied out over the panel was a fun one to shade. Of course, I saved some work for myself by waiting until ink, shading, color and highlight layers were all in place before I copied the frame for the triptych. I thought it would be just a matter of adding the speech bubbles at that point, but it took a bit more. The frames needed to be differentiated very badly. Thankfully, being an avid fan of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," I immediately thought of using a dark line for the outer two copies, and I later found using a blurry eraser to trim the center copy compounded the effect. The center panel was already going to be silent, thanks to what I learned from McCloud's book in the section on sequential perceptions of time. Before I finished, I applied another of the book's concepts (this one on auditory perception while reading words associate with pictures) to the second speech bubble, which is why it is lower and has a swooped tail. Hopefully, this one will run in our edition before Nov. 6, but we'll see how things work.