Section Description

Cartooning workshop is an intensive exploration of the many aspects of composing, drawing, inking, and publishing cartoons, comics, and graphic narrative. Experience in drawing is not necessary?this course emphasizes visual clarity and ?writing with pictures? as a creative mean self-expression. We begin with single-panel gag-cartoons (New Yorker style) and build to three- or four-panel strips, single tabloid pages, to multi-page story. In-class exercises and homework focus on the building blocks of comics: drawing, composition, layout, design, narrative structure, inking, and lettering skills, including basic instruction in perspective and figure drawing. We will explore a variety of media that can be used to create comics. For the final project students will create their own published mini-comic from thumbnail sketches through scanning, Photoshop editing (with an in-class tutorial), layout, and printing. Discussion and analysis of past and current comic artists and genres (including web comics) and on-going critiques of student work will provide insight and inspiration. This course loosely follows School of Visual Arts instructors Abel and Madden?s Drawing Words and Writing Pictures as well as the curriculum at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT.