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Posts Tagged ‘activity’

Haiku comics

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

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Teaching Comics to teens week 2 day 5: Yellow Fever

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Derek Mainhart lays down the comics history for his students, and gets them to draw their own, updated Yellow Kids!

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Teaching Comics to teens week 2 day 4: Basic Character Design

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Now that your students are approaching the final version of their Gag Cartoon, it’s time for some more drawing lessons. Nothing terribly complex, but these simple concepts can make all the difference in the work of a neophyte cartoonist, both in visual appeal and readability.

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Teaching comics to teens week 2 day 2: “The Horror!”

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Early in Mastering Comics, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden discuss ‘the Horror of the Blank Page’ (Chapter 2). Every artist who has ever put pen to paper has felt it, and likely some of your students will be feeling it now.

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Teaching Comics to Teens Week 2 Day 1: Gag me with a ‘toon

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In DWWP, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden begin with this basic unit of comic art—the single panel cartoon. This approach only makes sense, and I utilize it as well.

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Teaching comics to teens day 4: Cartooning through the ages

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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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The anatomy of doors

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This is one of several features we had to drop from Mastering Comics for length, and will be posting here. For more like this, and better, check out the book! (For another sample of the kind of stuff that we just couldn’t shoehorn into our giant book, check out our guide to laying out bleeds.) Read More

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Teaching comics to teens day 3: Learning basic cartooning techniques

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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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Teaching comics to teens day 2: Creating an exquisite corpse

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

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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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