I am a firm believer in exploring the rich history of the cartooning medium; not only for its own illustrious sake, but as a fount of inspiration for my students’ work. (I also admit that I love teaching it. Windsor McCay, Siegel and Shuster, The Fleischer Bros., why wouldn’t you teach it?)
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As you know, cartooning is primarily about storytelling. However, for some students a big motivation for taking the class is to learn how to draw. But, as any artist knows, the best way to learn how to draw is simply to do it. Over and over again.
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The second day will be about them getting to know each other. I like to have the class play a game called The Exquisite Corpse. Originally conceived by Andre Breton and the Surrealists, the game encourages group creativity through random chance (in my experience, kids love all things random).
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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.
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DWWP is a 15-chapter book designed to accompany a typical university-level studio art class meeting three hours a week. However, if you are actually teaching a class like that, you will quickly realize that our book is quite generously overstuffed and there is almost no way you can touch on every single item in the book in the classroom.
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Over the last two years, Tom Hart and I have been offering an advanced comics seminar that I believe is a new and fruitful addition to comics education. A description and some reflections.
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As I promised last week when I posted 2008 Portland workshop follow up, here’s the syllabus we followed for that class. Looking back on it now, it seems like we probably could have put more detail in there! But the group was so dynamic, and with our (then) new textbook in hand, we never felt ...
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I’m designing a whole new curriculum, which, though based on others I’ve done, still poses a lot of interesting new questions and problems. I thought I’d throw it out here as I go and see if anyone has any ideas about what I’m planning. I’ll continue to post updates as I develop this workshop, and I plan to blog it while in Miami Beach in late June.
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Matt and I were in Huntington WV in February as Walter Gropius Master Artists at the Huntington Museum of Art. (I also gave a talk at Marshall University.) The museum hung a large show of our work (in conjunction with the opening of the LitGraphic show) and we offered an intensive workshop to residents of the area—a soup-to-nuts “how to think about and make comics” workshop in just two and a half days.
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This is a syllabus for a five-day intensive workshop that could meet for six hours a day over the course of a week or, alternately, over the course of five weeks. It would be too much to try and get through a multiple-page story in that time, so the focus here is on learning the ...
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Drawing Words & Writing Pictures is a comics educational project with book and web components. Visit how to use for more ideas on content you might like, or send us an email to be put on our mailing list.
--Matt and Jessica
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"A goldmine of essential information for every aspiring comics artist. Highly recommended."
-Scott McCloud
Drawing Words & Writing Pictures is a comics educational project with book and web components. Visit how to use for more ideas on content you might like, or send us an email to be put on our mailing list.
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