Comics Challenge – Comics Club

Comics Challenge: Make a Comic Shop!

This challenge was inspired by one of Jess Bradley‘s brilliant sketch book projects.

Jess has made her own miniature bookshop:

Bookshop 01

Your challenge is to work alongside other comic club members to make a comic shop.

The mini-comics you make could be tiny copies of your favourite comics, they could be comics you’ve written, or they could be brand new titles you’ve just made up.

You can create your comic shop in a sketchbook, or you could make a small model comic shop in a cardboard box.

Once the shop is stocked with comics, have a grand opening and read each other’s tiny stories.

Many thanks to Jess Bradley for sharing her ideas and photos with us!

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.

July Comics Challenge

This month’s challenge has been devised by Stoneydown Park School Drawing Group.

The challenge is inspired by the comics made by the group for this year’s Comic Swap.

Can you invent a spray that does exciting things?

Sprays examples

Use one of the templates below to invent you own magical spray and show how it works.

Spray template plain; Spray template colour; Spray template Black and white.

Thanks to Ben Thompson and the Stoneydown Park School Drawing Club for providing the challenge!

December Comics Challenge: Start in the Middle!

This month’s brilliant comic challenges come from Lydia Wysocki of Applied Comics Etc.

comicsclubblog1

If you want, you can download a 3×4 grid and a 2×5 grid for drawing your comics, or you can download the worksheets here.

Thanks again to Lydia for providing this month’s challenge!

You can read the excellent Newcastle Science Comics – Asteroid Belter and Spineless (both edited by Lydia) by going here and clicking on the images at the right of the page: http://newcastlesciencecomic.blogspot.co.uk/

November Comics Challenge: Weird and Unusual Creatures!

This month’s comic challenge has been devised for us by Damon Herd of Dundee Comics Creative Space. Thanks Damon!

Damon writes:
This month our Comics Clubbers here in Dundee have been working on comics inspired by Gulliver’s Travels as DCCS is part of the Being Human Festival and we are celebrating the 350th anniversary of author Jonathan Swift’s birth. In the book Lemuel Gulliver travels to lots of strange places such as Lilliput, where the people are all around 6 inches tall. Later he visits the flying island of Laputa, and then Land of the Houyhnhnms, where talking horses rule over the Yahoos, who are deformed and savage humanoids.

This comics challenge is to invent a weird and unusual creature (maybe one that Gulliver might meet!) and then create a one page comic starring that creature. To help you we have supplied a list of inspirations. The best way to invent your creature is to print out the sheet and then cut out all the suggestions. Put the ‘creatures’, ‘sizes’, and ‘locations’ in separate cups and then pick one from each. So for example, you might pick an octopus that is the size of Australia who lives in a Haunted House! You should have enough information to inspire a design and story. We have included a 6 panel grid to print out to create your story on but feel free to design your own page and panels. Also, you can mix up the categories and add new ones if you want to! Happy drawing!

Microsoft Word - gulliver.docx

6 panel grid