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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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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This syllabus could easily be used for a 12-week class as well. It would probably be enough to add a few extra work days, but you could also add back in some of the lessons we cut here, such as 5.2, “Figuring out the figure 1″ and 12.2, “Figuring out the figure 2,”
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How specifically we use common terms like “homework.”
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Welcome to DWWP
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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Buy Drawing Words & Writing Pictures and the sequel, Mastering Comics, from us directly, or from your favorite vendor, via this link.
"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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