Comics Challenge: Comic Narratives

This Comic Challenge comes to us from the Salford Comics Club.

The aim of this challenge is to use the narrative prompts on the sheets to help you tell your story. Narrative 3-panel-comic  Narrative 6-panel-comics

6-panel-page3-panel-page

If you need help getting started, Salford Comic Club suggest you try this:

First draw:

  • something you play with
  • something you wear and
  • something you eat

Then use one or more of these things as inspiration for characters.

Now create a story around these characters, using these blank comic templates with thought/narration bubbles on them to help guide your story and move the action forward.

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You can see some more of the Salford Comics Club members’ comics here.

Thanks so much to Joanne Wozencroft for sharing this challenge with us!

Club Spotlight: Salford Comics Club

A few months ago we noticed the brilliant responses to some of our Comics Challenges on the Salford Comics Club blog. Hannah Sackett talked to Joanne Wozencroft about their club.

Name of your Comic Club: Salford Comics Club.

Where do you meet and how often? Height Library in Salford, once a month.

Average number of members: 8 – 12

How long have you been running? Since June 2018

Tell us about your club:
Salford Comics Club is a small, free community-run comics club that runs every second Saturday of the month. We’re open to anyone aged 6 to 14, and often have a real mix of ages in our drop-in sessions.

We set up the club with the aim of getting more kids into the local library and sharing our love of comics – but ultimately, we want kids to have fun! Each session usually has a theme, linked to a challenge that aims to help the children come up with an idea for and create a comic to take home with them. This can be anything from remembrance and history (our theme for November) to animal hybrids and random shapes.

Do you have a comic club activity you’d like to share:
One of our club’s favourite activities to end on is a ‘drawing game’ – we try and do one of these every week. Each person takes it in turn to draw something on our large flip chart, everyone adding a bit to the drawing until we’ve got our very own crowd-sourced. masterpiece. The results are usually something hilarious and horrific in equal measure.

Please do check out the club’s blog to see more of their brilliant comics!

Comics Challenge: Group Comics

This challenge involves working together as a group to make a comic. Each club member draws a single panel, then they are put together in order to create a whole comic.

The challenge is to create a “Day in the Life” comic of a character or a place.

Day in the Life 01

Day in the Life 02

As a group you could (for example) decide to recreate a day in the life of Whiskers the cat, or a day in the life of a space station. Cut up the sheets (Group comic – sheet 01 and Group comic – sheet 02) into individual panels and share them out across the group. When the panels are finished, put them back together in order to discover the events of the day!

You could use post-it notes or index cards instead of these sheets, and you could tell the story of a journey over days or weeks, or the history of a country or planet over years, decades or centuries, rather than a day in the life.

Please get in touch to share pictures of your Comics Challenge comics!

 

Challenge Accepted!

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It’s brilliant to hear from comic clubs after they’ve taken up one of our challenges.

Some excellent comics were made my members of the Inkpots Comic Crew in response to Jess Bradley’s August Comics Challenge

Gill Pawley of Inkpots shared some of the group’s comics and told us:

“The challenge set by Jess was the perfect timing for us at Inkpots as we were returning to our after school clubs after the summer break. We already had a number of children who really love creating cartoons and have been joined by some new members who also do, so our Comic Crew is really thriving. We have really enjoyed Jess’s challenge and some children who have never made a cartoon joined in too. The ideas also sparked off some other stories and children went on to create longer stories. Thanks so much Jess and Comics Club Blog!”

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Thanks so much to Gill and the Inkpots Comic Crew for sharing these with us!

Please get in touch with us at comicsclub.blog@gmail.com if you would like your club’s challenge comics shared on this site.

Comic Challenge: Daily Diary

Keeping a diary is a common New Year’s resolution, but it can be hard to think of things to write in a diary every day.

Cartoonist Lynda Barry encourages students in her comics classes to keep a diary of the things they notice in the world around them. Keeping this kind of diary can help you as a cartoonist, writer and artist. It can also give you great ideas for comics, characters and dialogue.

You can use Lynda Barry’s diary format, or you can use this simplified version:

Diary Challenge

You can download a Diary Challenge double page printout.

Don’t worry if you don’t remember to keep a diary every day, just keep drawing and writing in it as often as you can.

Comic club members could keep a diary for at least seven days, then at the next comic club meeting they could use their favourite words, phrases and images from their diary to make a comic.

Comic club leaders, if you haven’t come across Lynda Barry’s Syllabus or What it is, they are full of brilliant ideas.

 

 

October 2018

Check out the great Comics Challenge drawings by members of the Salford Comics Club! There are lots of brilliant ideas for club activities on their site.

Salford Comics Club

This month’s starter activity, taken from ComicsClub.blog’s September Comics Challenge, was to draw yourself as random things!

Continuing with the theme of random things, we then asked the children to select and draw two random things from this list of random categories:

  • Something light
  • Something heavy
  • Something spiky
  • Something round
  • Something that needs to be plugged in

The children then had to find a way to link those two things in a story/comic. Should they combine the two objects to create an interesting character? Or should the story revolve around those two objects? Or should one object be the character and the other a tool?

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Comics Challenge: Comic Jam Scrabble!

For this version of a comic jam you will need post-it notes or squares of plain paper.

Someone starts the jam by drawing the start of a comic, with each post-it note as a panel. You can draw a well-known story or make one up.

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Now two more people can join the jam.

One continues to draw the original story, taking the story wherever they like.

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The other person chooses one of the panels to use as part of a new comic. For example:

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Now more and more people can join in, adding new comics, just as you would add new words in scrabble.

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Keep going until you run out of space!

Please do send us some photos if you take up this challenge.

Comics Challenge: Inktober Prompts

Jess Bradley’s Inktober drawing for the prompt ‘STRETCH’

Lots of cartoonists have been taking part in Inktober– an annual challenge that involves making an ink drawing every day of the month. Inktober may be coming to an end, but the drawing prompts provided on their website are useful all year round.

This comic challenge makes use of Inktober-style prompts to make a drawing game that is a perfect warm up activity for comic club.

You will need: Paper, pens, a small bag or box, scissors, timer/stopwatch (optional).

STEP 1: Print out and cut up the prompts provided here: Prompts 01 

Prompts 01

You can also use this blank sheet to create your own list of prompts: Prompts 02. Put the words in a small bag or box.

STEP TWO: Take a sheet of A4 paper and fold it three times, then unfold, to create eight spaces for drawing in.Folded page

STEP THREE: One person picks a prompt word out of the bag or box and reads out the word. Draw the first thing that pops into your head when you hear the word. If you want you can use a timer and have everyone draw a picture in one minute or thirty seconds.

STEP FOUR: Repeat until you have filled up your page (or several pages).

 

September Comics Challenge

The most popular warm-up drawing activity at Widcombe Comic Club is called “Draw yourself as a …” Each time the club meets, there is a new sheet to fill in. To begin with they were made by me, but now club members are making their own sheets too.

Draw yourself 01

What would you look like as a cake or a boot or an owl? You can share your drawings with us on @ComicsClubBLOG .

Download the sheets here:

Draw yourself 01

Draw yourself 02

Draw yourself 03

Draw yourself 02                 Draw yourself 03