Workshop three, New Continental, Preston - 18th September - DONE!!!!

Workshop Three.

The final workshop then, done and dusted! The group finally emerge as fully qualified comic artists. As part of this weeks session we gave the groups' drawing skills the final polish and worked on facial expressions - to try and get their characters to 'act' on the comic page. We worked through the basic proportions of the face and then I spent some time posing for the group - pulling faces and gurning trying to look 'surprised' and 'angry' amongst other daft expressions.

As part of the final exercise, we concentrated on Comic Book covers for the characters and stories that had been designed in the previous weeks. Below are some of the stars of the group with their covers. I also received my second comic, this time from Christian, who presents "Belly-flop Boy and the Laser Lamps from Outer Space."

Thanks to everyone who came along to the workshops and I hope that you had as good a time as I did - and wish you success in the future, I hope one day to be buying your comics in the comic shop!

Anthony Mercer, September 2010

Here's Alexa, Theo, Christian and Oscar...

And here's a cover detail and a few pages from "Belly-Flop Boy"

Workshop two, New Continental, September 11th 2010

Workshop two!

Following on from workshop one's character designing, the group learnt some nifty tips and tricks to get their drawings to the next level. We concentrated on the basics of character drawing by simplifying complicated things like the human body down to very simple lines, which we would then build up using simple shapes. I had to do a bit of posing in this workshop - pretending to be Theo's character DOOM for a bit of reference for him, but I think we got there in the end.
We essentially worked backwards, starting with a drawing exercise putting final details onto a character, to building up from the simple stick figure drawing. Once this was done, we got busy putting our new found skills into creating our own mini-comics.
Mini-comics are a great way to quickly tell stories to swap and share with friends - they are very cheap to do and I hope that the workshoppers go off and make lots of their own.
Incidentally, I got my first full comic from Alexa (perhaps with a little assistance from Oscar?) starring their character, Underpants Alien! Thank you guys!

Workshop one, New Continental, Preston - DONE!!!

Well, first of all thanks very much to everyone who came along to the first workshop session. I had a great time and was glad for a glimpse inside all of the participants heads (turns out it's all aliens in underpants, some kind of superhero who lives in a rubbish dump with a bin bag for a cape, a superheroine who rides around on a bee... stuff like that) Time disappeared sooner than we thought so we'll be picking up next week where we left off with some character design and some tips on drawing before we get everyones comics down on paper.

What we did have time for though, was a discussion about what makes a comic a comic. To find this out, we had a big pile of comics and the group looked very closely at the pages and we made a list of what they saw.

We boiled it down into a few essential items; including panels, speech bubbles, sound effects, characters and of course; the all important story. We then collectively came up with an idea for a character and had a 3-way comic jam (where everyone drew a panel of a four panel strip, then passed it on to the next person..and so on)

Here are a few pictures from the day as well as our character designs for "Stinky Sid" and some of the comic strips I managed to grab at the end of the workshop.

Looking forward to next weeks workshop now!

Note: If you're around in Preston next Saturday at 12.00, drop the New Continental an email and come along, everyone welcome!

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