Comix Class: Observational drawing

Last Thursday was Observational Drawing. Tough enough to do with adults and older kids, near on impossible with the 10 and under crowd. I had a much smaller group this week after losing some kids to camp. I knew that keeping their attention for life-drawing would be very difficult and I read a lot of different teaching techniques from the internet. All of them suggested only drawing from life in very short bursts, so the kids don't get discouraged. It's VERY hard, especially for younger children. Another thing all these techniques had in common was NEVER drawing for them, no demos whatsoever. If they don't understand the principles quite right, explain to them, or just let them do their own thing. But seeing the drawings of someone more experienced can be very daunting and intimidating for some kids. I've had experience with this before, while drawing with kids. They give up on their own drawings, and just ask me to draw things FOR them, because I'm better at it. It's a rare child who understands that only by doing over and over and over can they achieve the same results. Or maybe they do understand, and have no desire to commit, or don't have that kind of dedication to drawing.

While I'm on the subject, I get really pissed off when people tell me I'm talented, that they "can't even draw stick people", and that I'm lucky to have such a "gift" for drawing, or to be so "artistic". Bull@#%* I work HARD. It helps that I had parents who encouraged me, and that I have a very competitive/obsessive personality. I wasn't any better at drawing than any of the other kids in my kindergarten class. Only better than a FEW in grade 1, and only because by then a lot of them were already not drawing every day. Already their parents were having them do extra math work and go to prep schools after school let out. These kids didn't have time to doodle and play freely like I did. The only skills I have over someone who can't draw stick people, are an obsessive nature (some would say stubborn), a hardness when it comes to myself, and a slightly better eye for small details. The reason I have the abilities I have today are because I worked hard to get them. I practiced drawing the way other people practice math equations, or speeches, or driving. 

Don't tell me I'm lucky. It wasn't luck. 

OK, enough ranting, check out some of the weird things the kids came up with. First, a blind contour drawing of yours truly! 

I had them draw some objects too. A necklace, some deodorant, a plastic dinosaur and a mug.

Because it was so popular last week, whenever I noticed the kids' attention waning, we did a round or two of exquisite corpses, I joined in this time, despite having plans not to draw for the kids. I was getting pretty bored myself. 

This is what we're gonna tackle next week, and a few other ways to make books too. Hopefully by the end of the class, the kids will have models of books they've made, so they can use them to make more whenever they want! I'm also hoping we'll have time to actually make short comics in at least one of them.

I'm not sure at this point if there will be any continuing classes in August, or if there IS, what the age group will be or what the subjects will be. I'm almost hoping for some older kids, with attention spans longer than 3 minutes, so we can get more into the knitty gritty, and the really fun stuff, something a little more complicated than barebones contour drawings and exquisite corpses.

So just in case you've forgotten, and you really wanna sign up your lil' rugrats for my last class:

SIGN UP FOR JULY 26TH BY 

CONTACTING LITTLE ISLAND:

phone: 416-901-7489 Email: mail@littleislandcomics.com

COMIX CLASS - Character design 101

This class was the token crowd pleaser, you know that everyone loves drawing characters, it's the best part! But boy, those kids were making me pull teeth to get them to stop talking about cruddy anime, and  just draw! It was time for me to put on my authoritative teacher hat on and use that voice I haven't had to use since my baby-sitting days. You know the one, your mom uses it when she starts to count to three. Anyway, hopefully I did some good this week and got their little brains thinking about shapes and consistency, which is really all I was going for.

So we started out with a handout about the use of col-erase (or other coloured pencils) to sketch with. They all got a col-erase pencil too, with a few colours to choose from (but mostly red, because that is MY favourite). Then, because I have a gaggle of anime girls, I had a handout that we talked about briefly detailing some anime/manga with good character design. I tried to warn my little ladies about the formulaic nature of manga, and how they need to think outside the box! We'll see if any of it sinks in, I know it took a long time for my manga-phase to peter out.

After the handouts we got down to BIDNIS. I had all my kids take some highlighters and cover a page with BLOBS.

This one I drew to cheer up one of my kids who was feeling a bit bummy after one of the other kids startled him.

Then they all passed to their right and had to make their neighbour's blobs into characters by adding features to the blobs with either markers or pencils or what have you. This is one of my favourite things to do when I'm in a rut, or when I just feel like doodling. It wasn't as popular with the kids as I'd hoped, but it was good for them. Made them stretch their little brains, even if they resented me for the exercise!

Our next activity was to make an exquisite corpse!! This was met with lukewarm enthusiasm, but ended up quite the crowd pleaser. At first all they did was criticize my english pronunciation of "corpse" which I had done on purpose not to be confusing, forgetting, of course, that all of them are currently taking french, and they wouldn't be confused at all.

We were going to make another round of corpses, but the kids had caught a glance of the last handout, and were too excited about what they saw, so we moved on! The last handout was full of ADVENTURE TIME! I found some character turnarounds from the pilot after a quick google image search, and used them as examples so the kids could create their own turnarounds! This was nice for me, I could let the kids talk and draw and not have to be the taskmaster. They just relaxed into it, and all of them created some pretty awesome designs! One of the girls has been reading Friends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks and drew something based on her favourite character. One of the boys didn't really feel like doing a turnaround, so he just drew his robot character and sidekick and coloured them with highlighters. One of my favourite kids (shh, don't tell them) has a character that is a shape shifting ball of slime, so he decided to draw a turnaround for a bunch of things his slime shifter changes into. like a car and an airplane and a hammer and a boomerang. SO CUTE.

And, due to popular request, Dr. Pop:

I'm losing at least one of my kids because she went off to camp, so there won't be any more appearances of Dr. Pop. But who knows, maybe he'll turn up in a book someday!

Next week I'm going to get the kids initiated into observational drawing! I'm expecting a significant drop in registration for this class, and a general lack of enthusiasm from the kids there, because when your imagination is as wild as theirs, why draw from real life? Also it is pretty difficult to do, but I have plans to break it down into very simple and easy exercises that should be pretty fun. I'm really looking forward to getting them drawing Blind Contours. That should make a pretty good blog post later!

And of course, the plug:

 SIGN UP FOR JULY 19th BY CONTACTING 

 LITTLE ISLAND! 

 Phone: 416-901-7489 E-mail: mail@littleislandcomics.com