Write and Draw Your Own Comic
Maps to: Illustrator/Animator · Cartoonist · Storyboard Artist · Graphic Novelist · Animator
Write a short comic and let AI draw it: 4 to 6 pages where the story and the characters are yours and AI draws the boxes, which comics call panels. The fun, maddening part: keeping one character's face the same in every panel, and making the story actually work. AI can draw all day, but it can't make a character feel like a person or a story end well. That's on you, and it's the part worth doing.
You're done when: A 4-6 page comic where the character looks like the same person in every panel and the story has real moments (not just nice-looking pictures), saved as a file and shared, and you can point to exactly what you redrew to fix a slow bit or a face that changed. The bar isn't "the panels look cool"; it's "the story works and the character feels like one person."
How this shows up on a resume or college app
I wrote and illustrated a short comic using AI tools, building a consistent character and making the story beats land, then redrawing the panels that drifted or dragged. I learned that character consistency in AI art is half craft and half prompt engineering, and that the story is the part only I can make work.
When you finish, BuildMe drafts your Common App activity description from what you actually built.
Not sure yet? Play 5 minutes as a illustrator/animator first and see how the work feels.
The plan
- 1
Step 1
Write the story + sketch the panels
Write a short story in 3-5 moments and sketch a rough plan of the boxes on each page. The story comes first: pretty panels with no story is the most common way these go wrong.
- 2
Step 2
Lock in what your character looks like
Make one drawing of your character with AI: the same face, clothes, and feel you can reuse in every panel. That one drawing is what you copy from every time.
- 3
Steps 3-4
Make the panels and put them on pages
Make your panels using that one character drawing, then put them onto pages. Faces will change on you. That's the known hard part, and reusing the same drawing and the same words beats luck.
- 4
Steps 5-6
Read it back, fix the slow bits, add the words, share it
Read your comic start to finish like a reader. Name where it goes slow or the face changes, and redraw those panels. Then add the speech bubbles and put it out.