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| My classroom was held in the fine arts gallery on Thursday evenings. I made this sign for the door to limit interruptions during this time. |
This semester I was given the opportunity to build a class for a group of little boys on the complexities of sequential art, as arranged by the Five Towns Jewish Community Center with Owl57. I was inventing this class from scratch, and was only given a few days notice prior to the first class to have the syllabus written. This was only the first of many trials and adversities on the way to the finish line.
The goal of our experimental 12 week course was to have a final product of one page completed. This is much different from our other children's fine arts courses, in which we complete 1 project every 2 weeks; each project focusing on one of many different medias, such as acrylic, watercolor, pastels, and clay building...
The class was exceedingly more difficult than other courses, as each student would be creating his own personalized story, and therefore would have to draw completely different characters and locations and require individual guidance.
As it turned out, the boys in my class couldn't have been more wonderful! The youngest one (David, 7) even did research and reading on making comic books before the class started! I was able to teach them much more difficult concepts than I had originally anticipated.
Every week I printed examples of different aspects of drawing and cartooning, such as head/body proportions, facial expressions, shadows, storyboarding, silhouettes and lettering. I completed a demonstration and they followed along on handmade (then photocopied) dittos I created for them.
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| I created personalized folders in the style of blank comic book covers for the boys to keep our notes together in. They were free to decorate, of course. |
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| EITAN |
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| DAVID |
Here are the completed comics I scanned after they were inked. Obviously, not a complete comic, but they came out great! So completely unique and adorable! And the boys loved how their comics came out, and really want to take another class with me! They were all so smart and considerate, and had a genuine interest in the entire process of book making. Really, they were intimidating for me as an artist in a competitive field. I had the boys color in the comics for the last day, and they received Medals of Art from the 5TJCC.
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