Cartooning Studio - Monday

Ending a Kickstarter JUST before starting a week of intensive Comic Summer Camp... maybe not the best planning - but it fits my M.O. I apologize for the sudden flood of the whole week's worth of blog posts you are about to get... but I think you'll find some good stuff in here.

Every day our teachers (we had four!) posted our day's schedule on the big white board along with an update to our looming deadline... "Friday at 1pm" - be sure to note the progression of the Skull each day in the future posts!

Our goal was to brainstorm, write, pencil, ink, and print an original 8 page comic... by Friday at 1pm! While also learning about all aspects of cartooning. I saw this as not only a great refresher and reinforcer for what I'd learned during the year, but also a great excuse (in my own head) to challenge myself to produce a whole comic in one week.

We did a really great exercise that you could apply to your own work, classes or meet-ups. It's called a "Comic Jam." It's a little confusing to explain, but once everyone caught on, it was really fun.

We were each given a sheet with 9 boxes drawn on it and told to write the phrase "They never looked back" in the center box. Then we had five minutes to draw an image in the first box and write a caption (about 7 words) in the second box.

So, for example, in this image below...
• I wrote "They never looked back" in the center box
• I drew a girl with aviator-ish glasses in the first box
• I wrote "The sky called to Henrietta. Unfortunately..."in the second box...
• When time was called, I passed it to the student on my right.

I got handed a new paper from the student on my left. They had drawn the first image and written the caption in the second box...
• I drew a van with vultures on it and cactuses in the background in the second box
• I wrote "And a strange smell filled the van"in the third box...
• When time was called, I passed it to the student on my right.

Get the idea? So this next one... I drew the picture in the third box and the caption in the fourth...

Then the fourth box...

Then the center box...

The sixth box...

The seventh box...

The eighth box...

And the ninth box... for the last box, we drew the picture AND wrote the caption into the first box - trying to tie the story up.

Here are a couple more (that I did not work on).

You end up with some very interesting... and strange... storylines! It was an excellent ice breaker and warm-up for our own projects.

We had to present our concept for an 8-page mini-comic. In most cases, we just had an idea, no actual story. Our homework was to create thumbnails and figure out how to fit the story into 8 pages.