Guess the animal and profession -

-from a great day yesterday at Fir Vale High School in Sheffield as part of their brilliant Comic Book Week. Forgotten the artist's name - sorry Thingy.

Ophelia

click to enlarge

Really pleased with how this worked out - a single page now on display in Manchester Art Gallery, in front of Arthur Hughes' Ophelia 1852 -


Our response was created by myself and a young people's mental health group of from Wigan. They chose the painting which provoked the most discussion and comments amongst them, which we then drew using the basic comic skills we'd covered in the morning. The background and layout I completed afterwards.
I'm excited by this as it seems such a simple way of responding to a particular artwork: depict those stood in front of it in discussion, so you see what the artwork would see looking back at the viewer. Now I'm keen to try this with other paintings or sculptures in the collection, before the Tory-led government has the place converted into a detention centre or abbatoir.

Connect the Plots - recent titles

Created by eleven amazing young folks at Mount St Marys High School in Leeds - nicest secondary school I've ever worked in. I think there's just something brilliant about Yorkshire kids, though I don't know what.

Hallowe'en Surprise, created up in Ulverston with some younger but equally talented artists,

-and Billy the Binman, also of Ulverston, but created by six adult humans. Again, a brilliant result!

Medway junior number 2 is due on Sunday, so it may be quiet here on Paw Quality Comics for a little while (what's new?). I am still working and sorting out Comical Animal, still due to launch on the 3rd December, which I'm pretty excited about, and so should be you. I'm excited about the baby too.

Ulverston sessions

Been enjoying Saturdays up in Ulverston - long commute but some nice work coming out of it. I'm running a day course for adults on the 30th Oct, if you are in the area.

Jake has taken what I showed him on using simplfied stick skeletons to improve your figure drawing and created these brilliant humanised Pokemon -


-and this jam comic has turned out nice - drawn by me, then Milly and Alice.


The 5 trains involved in getting me there and back mean I'm actually using my sketchbook, though not much of it is worth showing.

Workshops brochure

Did I ever post this? Maybe, but here it is again - the brochure I send/hand out to teachers and schools, in the hope that I can continue buying secondhand books by working for a living. It's printed using the risograph machine at MARC the printers in Manchester, who are dead cheap and very capable.
Click to enlarge, as they've come out a bit small on screen.

Masterchef - the bromance

Here's what happens if you get eight strangers together in a room for a weekend and teach them comic skills -




Nothing to do with me - I just gave them the tools.

Nice session on friday -

Congratulations to Kayleigh, Kieran, Ben, Katie, Jemma, Brent, David and Steven upon completion of Sewercide - Stockport's newest and finest connect-the-plots comic -

Directional flow in comics

Sometimes when I'm teaching comics, and I'm trying to encourage kids to keep it all clear and simple, I'll tell them Charles Schulz's observation that "good cartooning is good design". I'll show them a few images of inflight safety cards and we discuss why it's important that the information is easy to 'read', even though they are always wordless.
And sometimes I'll find myself talking about how artists often use the fact that we read (both words and images) from left to right, and use it to subtly make their story (or 'information') clearer or more explicit. I think I probably became aware of it myself having read 'How to Read Nancy' by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik, which unpicks the visual mechanics of Bushmiller's deceptively simple creation -


Just about every Nancy strip I've ever seen has begun with her walking into the story left to right, just as you the reader are doing, leading you smoothly towards the next panel - before you even realise it you've read the whole story (I've a quote somewhere that I will post as soon as I find it, that essentially says that Bushmiller makes it impossible to look at the strip and NOT read it).



He is also very skilful at halting this flow when the story calls for it - usually at the end or punchline - by turning Nancy or another character to face to the right. Visually this acts as a kind of punctuation - stop reading here. In the traditional newspaper strip format this is especially useful, rounding the story off and making sure you don't start straight into Dilbert or Garfield without an appropriate pause.

Since I became aware of this manipulation I've noticed it everywhere, in comics and childrens books. For example, The Berenstain's Bears in the Night, which structurally hangs on you identifying and relating to the cubs, following alongside, being visually confronted and startled by the owl, then turning back on yourself and racing back in the opposite direction.

(not the complete book, just sample pages to make the point)

In a strange way, the cub racing right to left, against your natural inclination to read the page left to right, has the effect of making him race faster, like being on a moving train as one passes in the opposite direction. The cubs haste here is not just created by the cartoony wooshlines and dustclouds, but also your eye travelling across the spread.

A procession depicted moving right to left also seems to work visually better than the other direction - we feel more like spectators stood watching it flow past -


- if for whatever reason we wanted to create an image of a procession that we want the reader to be immersed or involved in, then depicting it travelling left to right will make the reader move in the same direction.

Wolfy & Jack

Well, both of the Hey 4 Eyes prints have sold, pretty quickly too, but the actual zine is available from the States - let me know and I'll pass on Robyn's email address to you rather than put it up here. As Christmas draws nearer I'll see if I can dig anything else out of the back of the plan chest.

in other news, yesterday was spent at Manchester Art Gallery with Steve, Mike and Dan attending the second day of my Create Comics weekend. following in the great tradition of Lumberjack and Mountie comics in Manchester -



- we created the following Connect the plots comic -