Activities

Our longtime friend and collaborator Paulo Patrício is an illustrator and cartoonist born in Angola and currently living in Portugal. Among his many projects, one that will be of particular interest to visitors to this blog is Quotesoncomics.com, an ever- growing collection of quotes about comics (also on Tumblr). Check his blog for more pictures and updates. It happens…

Paulo Patrício is a dynamo. Jessica and I met him in Portugal in the late 90s and ever since he has impressed us with his enthusiasm and can-do spirit (in addition to being an excellent illustrator and cartoonist). Among his many projects are the website Quotes On Comics and his mini-sketchbook series, Le Sketch (which…

Here’s a simple and novel approach to making minicomics (self-published, handmade comics) that we recently adapted  into a classroom activity for our sophomore Storytelling class at SVA. I’m also considering using it in my upcoming Obstacle Course workshop at MoCCA. The Five-Page Folded Minicomic (AKA foldy), as developed and promoted by cartoonist Kenan Rubenstein, is…

Savvy comics artists have been using Deleter brand graphic white to correct their art for years. Despite the name, it’s a Japanese brand, very high density, easy to use, good coverage. Finding a good graphic white is tough: when you find a good one, you really feel some loyalty. Deleter has earned ours. You can…

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.

I  just posted here about a new comics jam activity I came up with. Could be a good warm-up exercise or time-filler in a comics class or workshop..

Our latest guest post is by Jarod Rosello, whom I met on a very interesting visit to Penn State last year. Jarod was ringleader of a group of creative writing grad students, all of whom were interested in comics, and in particular, in how to incorporate comics into their teaching of freshman comp and other…

The “pictureless comic” activity, originally from Chapter 7 of DWWP, is one that we use constantly, in formal classes, in intensive workshops, and in casual talks and improvised situations. We once did it in a lecture hall at a comic convention with 200 people! It has so many advantages: at its core, it’s a study…

A great way to introduce people to the world of comics is to make a “jam comic” with a class or workshop. A jam comic is an improvised collaborative comic wherein one person draws a single panel and then passes it on to the next person, whose job it is to draw a new panel…

We talk constantly about the importance of working for reproduction in our classes (and in DWWP, of course). Comics are, after all, primarily, if not exclusively, a medium seen in copies, not originals, whether those be on paper or digital. We have our students print minicomics at the end of most of our courses, but…

Here’s  a warm-up exercise whose goal is to activate your drawing and storytelling muscles at the same time. It could be a classroom activity but it also works great to do on your own, at home or in a café or bar. This is also the first of a number of posts we will be…

Here’s a weird and fun activity that we use to play around with the outer limits of the relationship between image and text. The basic idea is that you give students a one page comic with all the dialogue and narration whited out of the balloons and boxes. They fill in text while deliberately disregarding…

In our recent workshop at the Huntington Museum of Art, we had the opportunity to try out one of the few exercises from DWWP that we’d not used in a classroom before: the Sum of its Parts (page 23). This is a version of an activity we found in a few advertising class syllabi and…

This is a collaborative game activity we came up with in order to teach principles of panel-by-panel storytelling. It is inspired by Scott McCloud in two ways: one reason we developed this game was to have an alternative to a game he invented called 5-Card Nancy, partly because of the rights issues (for our textbook)…