Tag: character design

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Woodside High School Comic Workshops

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In March I had the pleasure of visiting Woodside High School in North London to run a couple of comic making workshops with some very talented students, chatting about my work and finding out who was already reading any comics…woodside-01Soon the participants were developing their own characters thinking about how the look of someone starts to tell that person’s story…woodside-01.1woodside-0.12 woodside-02There were some great drawings and ideas, including depictions of very angry teachers…woodside-03 woodside-04 woodside-05 woodside-06I finished off each workshop suggesting how the characters could feature in their own short comic strip…woodside-07

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Workshop Round Up: 2 Schools, 2 Libraries and a Museum!

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It’s been a busy but fun time lately running loads of comic workshops.

I’ve started a project through Apples and Snakes.  Poet and writer Inua Ellams and I are working with pupils of City of London Academy and Highbury Fields School, both in Islington. We’re developing a poem and a story that will be visualised and turned into a printed booklet.
We’ve got a few sessions to go and so far the children’s work looks extremely promising…

Here’s some great characters designed as a warm up for the City of London Academy kids..

CityIs2 CityIs1Next up was last Tuesday’s half term holiday workshop at Walthamstow Library.  Here’s some more character designs from them…Walthamstow1 Walthamstow2 Walthamstow3 Walthamstow4That last one also includes a happy cat character I asked the kids to create, alongside some other possibilities…Walthamstow5 Walthamstow6 Walthamstow7 Walthamstow8 Walthamstow9Next up, was a fabulous visit to the lovely Higham Hill Library…
Higham1 Higham2 Higham3These children learnt how to craft comics and told some fantastic stories…
Higham4 Higham5 Higham6 Higham7 Higham8Finally I made a return visit to the fantastic Cartoon Museum,  which has this wonderful space to teach…
CartoonMuseum1Visiting the museum on the day were the Crystal Palace Community Development Trust (Art Group).  The teenagers had lots of emerging talent which they used in my Manga workshop…
CartoonMuseum2 CartoonMuseum3 CartoonMuseum4 CartoonMuseum5Phew!  Lots more workshops to come soon…

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Comic Workshops: The Cartoon Museum and Barking Library

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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.

cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-1Check 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.

cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-4We worked on different ways to resolve a set-up in a three panel comic strip…
cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-2 cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-3And then the kids got working on their own panels, with some great punchlines.
cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-5cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-A cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-6 cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-7 cartoon-museum-11Oct2013-8The 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!

barking-library-12Oct2013-1All 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.barking-library-12Oct2013-2 barking-library-12Oct2013-3They even wrote their own back stories of characters based on pictures and portraits.

barking-library-12Oct2013-4 barking-library-12Oct2013-5All 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!