MAKING COMICS | JUNE 9-13 Have children ages 12-18 that want to make comics? I’ll be teaching a five-day comics workshop at Higher Ground Learning in Salt Lake City, June 9-13, covering everything from generating and filtering story ideas, developing characters and story arcs, laying out comics pages and speech bubbles, making rough drafts, and publishing opportunities for comics-makers. I…
WRITING SYMPOSIUM Taking its name from the Douglas Adam’s books, Life, the Universe and Everything is an annual symposium on sci-fi and fantasy, geared toward writers, artists, filmmakers and fans. I’ve been attending the symposium for several years now and this will be my fourth year participating as a panelist. LTUE is a great opportunity for writers…
This Saturday, August 17, will be Salt Lake’s first ToshoCON, a free non-profit anime convention for teens, held by the Salt Lake County Library in Utah. The event is for teens ages 12-19 and will include panel discussions, a cosplay contest, viewing room, crafts, manga swap, vendor marketplace and a dance to top off the night!…
(Continued from Part 6: Making a Jam Comic) WE LOVE MAKING COMICS Comics have a language all their own. The unique combination of words and images make comics a broad medium, capable of telling all kinds of stories in all kinds of ways. I often give comics presentations to students and educators and am always…
(Continued from Part 5: Character Design & Wordless Comics) WHAT’S A JAM COMIC? A jam comic is a collaborative comic between students, where the focus is to celebrate and play off of each other’s creations. One student might draw all of the pictures, while another adds the text. Another jam could be made while playing…
(Continued from Part 3) REVIEW Ask the students which comics and books they read yesterday. Ask if they watched any movies or tv shows and if they were able to pick out signs of a three-act structure. It’s a big concept to take in at first, but once students are able to see the structure,…
(Continued from Part 2) REVIEW Ask the students if they did anything in their new sketchbooks between classes. Ask if any of the students would be willing to share what they’ve been writing or drawing and what they like about the sketchbooks. Take a few minutes to give each student the follow handouts (right-click on each…
(Continued from Part 1) HOW DOES A COMIC WORK? One of the big questions we are asking in class is “how does a comic work?” Of course we want to know what a comic is and how to make one, but we’re doing so from the inside-out. We’re taking it apart to understand it. For…
5 POINTS OF FOCUS Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to teach a class on making comics and graphic novels to a group of 13-16 year-olds. Teaching comics is not something new to me–over the last couple of years I’ve given nearly two dozen workshops on everything from writing for comics, to developing characters,…
This week I’ve been teaching a group of 13-16 year olds about making comics. We’ve talked about storytelling, writing, drawing, comics terms and forms, character development, perspective and page layout. It’s been a very busy week! IDEAS On Wednesday I gave a short presentation on how I made my graphic novel, Upside Down: A Vampire Tale,…