Comics with Kids

Hi Gang,

Sorry I've been quiet on here for a couple weeks! Things have been a little busy, we had family visiting, and then I did a whole day of comics workshops at my niece's school last week. It was really fun, and exhausting, and I'm pretty sure I caught some germs from the little rascals. I've been sick all weekend but I've watched like 5 Red Sox games so it's not all bad. Even though they stink right now 🥲

So here is a photo dump from the day of workshops! My niece Hazel is 8, and in 2nd grade. Their school has a thing called author day, where an author comes to school and visits all of the classes. I visited all the classes from K-8 and did basically the same thing with every group. I haven't done anything like this since probably 2019, so I was pretty nervous about how it would go, but the kids loved it and it gave me some confidence (which is good because I'm teaching 2 weeks of comics camp this summer 😅).

First I would show them all how to draw Freddy and her dog Frank step by step, then I'd talk about how getting to know a character is the most important part of a story for me. Next I'd ask them all to tell me an animal, a job, and a feeling/emotion (i.e. a grumpy duck train conductor) , and I'd draw that on the board, asking them what I could add to give clues about what the job and feeling were.

Then the kids would all pick a job/feeling/animal out of some envelopes, and work on drawing their own characters. Every time I do this I'm so blown away by the imagination and creativity of kids, they just immediately start drawing and come up with some incredible stuff. Even the kindergarteners! I couldn't believe the work they did.

Next I'd give them a sheet with 6 blank panels drawn on it, and ask them to think about why their characters were feeling how they were feeling, and how they got that way. Then I just asked them to draw that story in those 6 panels.

Then if there was time, I'd show them how to make a little book from folding and cutting one sheet of paper, and a sample one with Freddy. I'll attach the PDFs for these in case you want to do some!

Drawing comics alone all the time, being in your head, you kind of forget about the magic of it...but watching kids make comics definitely reminded me of that magic.

Hope you all have had a good weekend,

❤️

mm