Teaching Cartooning
Yesterday was my first day of teaching Cartooning at the AMOA Art School. The Austin Museum of Art has a gorgeous little campus at the Laguna Gloria location. (There’s also a downtown AMOA on Congress Avenue, just down the street from the state capitol.) We’re in the Solarium. A room with windows wrapping around three sides.
The morning class is for ages 12-14, and after lunch I teach a class of 9-11 year olds. The course is everyday this week, and our objective is to make a comicstrip by the end of the week.
The kids exceeded my expectations. The students were brimming with enthusiasm, hard work and creativity.
Yesterday we dove in and talked about creating characters. We worked on making a cast that invited conflict or humor. As the kids developed their characters, they came up with a wide array of personalities and story directions. I was thrilled to see the divergent creative ideas that each of them produced.
Needless to say, I used Lord Alfred Zango, Jr. as an example. The crazy hair, the visor, the bathrobe and bunny slippers. I took them through the process of developing the laziest supervillain.
By the end of each class, the students had created 1-3 pages of finished character reference. They inked a final drawing of their characters after working on rough designs. They gave their characters names and wrote down the major traits for their new cartoon persona.
It was fun. Inspiring. And not all that hard. I mean, I just had to guide them. It was the students who had the energy and creativity to make these new cartoon characters. They invented penguins and superheroes and girl detectives. There were characters shaped like Mandarin letters and an evil mouse that loved shoes.
The class syllabus didn’t have us making cartoons until tomorrow. But the kids exceeded my expectations, so instead, today we’re going to start making comicstrips by the end of class. I mean, why would I hold them back? The kiddos are ready.
1 month ago