I had a busy but fun couple of days at the end of last week, doing 3 comics workshops at the Cartoon Museum on Friday and one at Barking Library on Saturday. Both were really enjoyable with nice kids producing fantastic work…
The Cartoon Museum is a great place to run workshops, or to visit for that matter. The place has an original Charles Schulz Peanuts strip in it for a start!
My workshops were based on making newspaper style comic strips, with a focus on the fine art of drawing silly expressions! Meanwhile the great Steve Marchant (writer, artist and co-founder of Cartoon Classroom) was imparting his vast knowledge of comic creation to another group of lucky children who had travelled down from Leicester.
Check out the skills of one of the children laying down some facial expressions.
“Smug” is not so easy to pull off but she managed it.
We worked on different ways to resolve a set-up in a three panel comic strip…
And then the kids got working on their own panels, with some great punchlines.
The next day I had a good time running a Character Creation workshop as part of the Get Barking and Dangenham Reading festival. Barking library is huge, wacky looking and had some great kids inside really into learning about comics.
I got my own poster and everything!
All the kids were really into comics and cartoons and manga and had a hundred fantastic questions for me.
They also proved they could draw amazing characters, picking up key points from character descriptions and visualising them.
They even wrote their own back stories of characters based on pictures and portraits.
All in all a successful couple of days other than this terrible picture of a man in a suit and stilettos with a mohwak, a parrot on his shoulder and a sword in his hand. Good characters can come from bad drawings though!
