Author: neillcameron

Our Comics challenge this month comes from special Guest Contributor Karen Rubins! Karen is an award-winning cartoonist and a contributor to The Phoenix, and also regularly teaches cartooning and manga workshops for children and young people.

Karen’s Comics Challenge is based around EMOTION, and it’s pretty self-explanatory. Here we go…

If you’re working with a group, it can be fun to get the kids to shout out as many ideas as they can for different emotions, and then try drawing them. You can get kids to act out the emotions – take turns pulling faces for their neighbours to draw!

The next step is to have a go at drawing a comic, using some of these emotions! And if you need some ideas to get started, here’s a Bonus Extra Activity from Kaz, that you can use as a starting point:

Just pick a SUPERLATIVE and a NOUN, and away you go!

Huge thanks to Kaz for letting us share these. We’d love to see whatever drawings and comics your groups come up with – you can leave comments here, or tweet us at @ComicsClubBLOG.

You can find out more about Karen’s work at her website, at karenrubins.com, and find out more about her upcoming classes and workshops here:  http://karenrubins.com/workshops/

Superheroes are fun, right? Everyone loves superheroes? Well they are the focus of this month’s COMICS CHALLENGE, where we’re all going to be having a go at making our own. That’s the challenge, nice and simple: Make Up A New Superhero. And here are some handy Templates We Prepared Earlier, to help you do just that!

Download the templates as a PDF!

Here’s a suggested ‘lesson plan’ / way to use these templates as the basis of a session with your group! This is based on the assumption that you have a whiteboard / flipchart / other flat and writeable-on surface to hand…

• Start by thinking about Famous Superheroes. How many Superheroes can the group name? Try writing all the answers up on the board as you go. Bonus Discussion Points: Who is the coolest? Who would win in a fight?
• Pick a couple of the suggested characters and see how much the group know about them. What is their secret identity? What superpowers do they have? Do they have any weaknesses? Who is their best friend? Who is their arch-nemesis?
• Using the suggested characters as a basis, make a list on the board of superhero THEMES (e.g. Bats, Spiders, Cats – lots of animal-themed ones) and SUPERPOWERS (e.g. flight, super strength, stretchiness – see how many you can think of).
• Get the group to come up with ideas for either the THEME or SUPERPOWER for a new hero. Try and get as many suggestions as possible on the board.
• Pick one and have a go at creating a new Superhero!  Have a go at drawing them on the board! Don’t worry if you think you’re not good at drawing, try and give it a go anyway. If it really *is* rubbish, it just works as an encouragement to the kids to try and do better!
• Okay, now everyone have a go! Confident artists can just dive straight in and start drawing; younger or less confident artists might want to use one of the worksheets provided above; just start designing a costume straight onto the template!
• Once everyone’s had long enough to draw, take a look at everyone’s new heroes. Get each artist to tell you about their character!
• FINAL STEP: everyone draw a comic about their superhero! You can use some of our handy comics page templates, to help you get started!

We’d love to see some of the results! You can tweet pictures at us at @ComicsClubBLOG, and we’d love to feature them here on the blog!

For this month’s Comic Challenge we are looking at SOUND EFFECTS in comics, and to talk us through it we’ve got this fantastic strip, produced exclusively for Comics Club by Louie Stowell and Freya Harrison!

Here are a couple of ideas for activities you can try with your Comics Club groups, working from that fantastic how-to:

1. NOISY COMICS! Everyone has to create a short comic – about whatever they like, but with the proviso that it must contain at least one sound effect in EVERY PANEL.
2. WHAT’S THAT SOUND? Come up with a short list of events which would create a loud noise – something exploding, someone shooting a laser, whatever you like – and then everyone has to pick one and draw a comic about it. You can come up with a few ideas for NOISY EVENTS yourself, or get the group to brainstorm some! Here are some Neill came up with earlier:

Encourage the kids to have a go at thinking what sound each would make – everyone have a go at making the noise! And then think how you’d translate that noise into a sound effect: firstly, how would you ‘spell’ it, and also how would you DRAW it? What kind of letters and shapes would you use?

3. WHAT’S THAT SOUND? (SUPER WEIRD VARIANT) – depending on how everyone got on with the above exercise, have a go at thinking up some EVEN WEIRDER events. Go super dtrange / conceptual – really challenge the kids with ‘how on earth would I even put that on paper?’. Again, here are some Neill came up with earlier, to get you started:

We’d love to see the comics you come up with! As ever, feel free to share stuff with us at @ComicsClubBlog on twitter!

Huge thanks to Louie and Freya for providing our excellent Sound FX comic! Louie is the writer and Freya one of the main illustrators who created Usborne’s fantastic book Write and Draw Your Own Comics, which is one of our top recommendations for getting kids making comics!

Louie is a writer and editor, check out her twitter for news about her projects, at @louiestowell!

And you can find more of Freya’s amazing work at freyaillustration.co.uk!