creative constraint Archives - Drawing Words Writing Pictures

Matt has put together a heavily-illustrated post about teaching using 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.

Haiku comics

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Matt

The haiku’s brevity and relative simplicity of rules make it a good candidate for a comics-making exercise.

Guest post: Dan Berry’s guide to making 24-hour comics

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Matt

In anticipation of the upcoming 24-Hour Comics event in Angoulême, France, cartoonist and teacher Dan Berry shares his pointers on how best to prepare yourself for this rewarding challenge.

Teaching comics to teens day 1: Using comics to tell your story

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Jessica

We inaugurate a fantastic new series by Derek Mainhart, who is setting out to write up an entire year’s curriculum for a comics class at the secondary level: middle school and high school. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be entertaining, well-planned, and incredibly useful.

24-hour comics day present, future & past

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Matt

This Saturday, October 1, is 24-hour Comics Day, and Matt takes the opportunity to reminisce about the repercussions of his 24-hour comic experience, many moons ago.

Notables 2010: Tom Motley et al.’s Made Out of “Mac” (True Fiction #8)

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Matt

A series of variations and transformations of what is perhaps the single most-parodied page of comics ever, the famous “Insult that Made a Man out of ‘Mac'” comic used to advertise the Charles Atlas correspondence bodybuilding course in old comic books. The original comic is opened to new vistas of post-modernism, literary allusion, absurdist humor, and even a touch of the poetic.

Make a “foldy” minicomic

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Matt

Here’s a cool activity where you make a little fold-out comic book out of a single sheet of paper.

ROYGBIV: a one-page, seven panel comics challenge

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Matt

On my blog I just posted about a new comics-making constraint I invented for a recent workshop. The basic idea is that you need to make a comic that uses all the colors of the rainbow—but in black and white only! Read the post and see some examples here.