Visual Art Academy 2018: Recap

Orientation

This marked the fifth year I was invited to teach cartooning at the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Visual Art Academy. I opted for only part-time, so just two classes starting at 8:30am of 6-12th graders: eight in one class and sixteen in the other. Not only is it an invaluable, lifelong lesson in the camaraderie of comics creators, but we are bonded by the common drive to spend what little of the short season in beautiful summer days is afforded to us in the Interior of Alaska indoors drawing. I think I'm also the only instructor that assigns them homework: best quote of the year "Hey... this is just like school."

'Toon tools of the trade

Once again it took the tone of a boot camp with full-on immersion in techniques and generating material for character design, single-panel gags, comic strips, one-pagers, collaborative pages + comics and their own minimum 3-page piece published in the class comic book.
Check out other backposts from the archive: a couple from 2013 here and here, 2014, 2015, and 2016 for more recaps + samples of student work.

After the students arm themselves with pencils, erasers, ballpoint pens and various thicknesses of Sharpies, we start in on warm-ups to get the creative juices flowing. In this timed exercise we have six panels on a letter-sized sheet of paper, and ink up a character first in five minutes, then two, then one, then thirty seconds, fifteen seconds and lastly five seconds.  Somewhere along this continuum we discover the balance between lavishing detail on a drawing versus the logistics of having to redraw a character hundreds if not thousands of times under the pressure of deadlines.

Another timed exercise that also incorporates teamwork is the venerable "Think Before You Ink" drill. Still amazed after all these years how someone can knock out a rendering of fairly complex scenarios in sixty seconds.

There's also one that I really like to use along with gag charts to help come up with ideas where everybody has ten seconds to react to prompts and write captions (ex: write something you overheard this morning"), then sixty seconds to illustrate another series from another list of different prompts (ex: "draw something you saw in a dream"), and then rearrange the cards to see what kind of random juxtapositions can trigger inspiration.

Interspersed with all the daily exercises I like to drop the occasional jam, either captions for a single-panel gag, or strips, or even the exquisite corpse. These jams are such a great way to unblock and free up the flow of ideas.

 
They are also really fun to do with friends and can be a way to foment some funny feelings, and serve as a reminder that inspiration is all around us and ideas can be gotten from absolutely anything.

Eventually we all graduate to drawing finished panels on Bristol board, a minimum of two from everybody. By this point there's a huge repository (or mulch-pile) of material from which to literally draw from. It's accumulated on the walls of the classroom, out in the hallway showcases and in their storage drawers and sketchbooks.

Personally I'm continually astonished at what happens when they are left alone to come up with whatever they want to do. All it takes sometimes is a little push, and then providing the time + place to run with their own imagination.

One-pagers are next, and as a sort of prompt we do a round of a "Start to Finish" exercise to grease the proverbial skids. Students are given two random images and are tasked with creating a four-panel page that starts with one and ends with the other. This can be a challenge when it's, say, clowns and astronauts, planets in outer space and asylum residents, or dinosaurs and hamburgers.
I think of these one-pagers in terms of two-tiered Sunday funnies as a way to transition from strips into longer narratives.

Here's a set of sample swatches excerpted from the next phase in cartoon boot camp: the collaborative page. But instead of the normal three-day long exercise, it's compressed into a single session: student #1 has fifteen minutes to write up a simple script (3-5 panels) for a one-page piece; student #2 then pencils the page (11x17") in thirty minutes; #3 inks it p in half an hour; #4 has the same amount of time to add value (graphite or wash). It's intense and rewarding!

The next day we all worked up a class comic book: everybody assembled in front of the huge blackboard and collectively brainstormed what quickly evolved into a fantastically convoluted tale. It gave us a chance to explore basic plot structures and simple story arcs, before knuckling down and cranking out another one-page piece in about an hour.

There were as many pages to the comic as there were students in the class (ten for the first, and twelve for the second) plus a cover, one of which was penciled by special guest artist (and incidentally the dean of the college) Todd Sherman, and inked/lettered by me, the other by a couple of the advanced students who took time out from working on their own independent projects.

This was a new exercise for me, inspired by the visiting artist Maria Franz who turned me onto this delightful group exercise. It's collaborative in that the first and last panels of each student's page has to dovetail with both the preceding and the following student's pages, so there is a lot of interaction and plotting. And even though one primary student is responsible for character designs of each character (and setting) that appears, other students follow their lead but put their own stylistic spin on everything, so there are some great takes on the material as the pages unfold and evolve throughout the process.

Gradually the output from the cartooning classes metastasized throughout the department, occupying about a third of the hallway display cases. This wasn't just to humblebrag showcase the tremendous amount of work we accomplished in just a couple short weeks (not to mention in only one-hour forty-minute sessions per day), but to provide the buffet of ideas from which to literally draw from. No excuses ("I don't know what to draw" etc.) as there were any number of possibilities - a whole freakin' wall in fact - to pick up on and re-purpose into their own stories.

Manuel/Wallace/Ely/Harrell/Gieser/Conde/Garcia/Gilbert/Palchikoff/Moren/Knapp/Rurup

Ostensibly the grande summation of the entire experience is encapsulated with the end product: the official comic book containing everybody's final pages (1-3 pages). I like to think that it's also the overall immersion and exposure to so many varied approaches to creating comics. I almost hope that they are left somehow unsatisfied and yet maintain enough momentum to keep on making more and more. Works for me.

This year I had a couple bonus "advanced" (one repeat attender and another taking both sessions of cartooning for half the day) students who I tasked with creating their own minimum 4-page comic. They, along with a few other folks hidden away among the class, really really surprised me with the quality of their work - there's always some serious surprises in store for me when I discover the depth of talent and passion just waiting to uncap.



Everybody also got a photocopied set of the collaborative pages and also the group comic, so together with all the leftovers from innumerable in-class exercises, there was quite the haul. Of course this was all a cartoon carrot at the end of the proverbial stick: they only got the goodies after completing one final project on the very last day... a minicomic that was copied + traded with everyone. That and taking down all the artwork festooning the department!

The opening was amazing: great turnout of folks plus a chance to meet with friends + family of the students, and watch them proudly show off all the work that they've done. But for me personally the very best moment was in catching a cartoonist who just couldn't resist making one. more. little. touch-up on their piece...

... this is what it's all about

Recap: Visual Art Academy 2015/Cartooning Courses

Front + back covers to the annual comic (front cover by Trinity)

   Had another really awesome and intense "boot camp" for cartooning for a third season teaching comics at the Visual Art Academy up at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Two classes for two weeks with a total of twenty-two aspiring practitioners of the craft, all immersed in the art of drawing. As each class only ran for an hour-and-a-half there wasn't a lot of time in the studio (compared to the usual semesterly routine of two-and-a-half or three hours per session), but since we met every day of the week there was good momentum in the sequential acquisition of skills and exercises.

The benign presence of Too Much Coffee Man watches over us all

   One of many highlights: take a group of energetic youngsters + the start of summer vacation + a beautiful, hot, sunny day outside, and spend it… indoors drawing comics. Just surreal to sit amidst a room of such intensely focused passion. While I didn't logistically have the extra time this year to upload everything to any on-line portfolios, here's linkage to previous posts from the Academy back in 2014 (here and here) + 2013 (here and here).

Smörgåsbord: the daily buffet

   Class schedule: every morning intro and a recap of the previous session w/samples & demos + timed exercises to get the creative juices going; materials + techniques, experimenting with textures and character development; gags/single-panels; strips; one-page personal projects for the official comic book; plus collaborative pages and last but not least minicomics. Seems like a lot to cram in, and it was, but the fleeting pangs of guilty conscience at the workload was more than offset by the great response - plus the added benefit of keeping everybody occupied meant we were all too busy to get distracted. It can sometimes be a challenge to maintain focus and exert some degree of discipline while herding cats, but channeling all that the energy into projects that yield immediate, positive results is a reward that can carry over into virtually any other arena in their life. Above & beyond any accidental instilling of literacy and a love of reading through the medium of comics, that was a shameless plug for the benefits of a liberal education... especially art classes. Natch.

Image: Tara, Jamie, Sarah, Gabby

   These are two samples of the collaborative page project, wherein both myself and my talented, hardworking studio assistant had to fill in for the occasional absent student. Hence the familiar style and tone creeping into the funny-food-chain. Four different people all contributed to each page: starting first with a simple one-page script for a one-page vignette (either a stand-alone sequence, an excerpt, or simply just an extension of the preceding exercise using a 3-5 panel strip format). Next a different student has to pencil out the sequence on a sheet of 11x17" Bristol board - subject to editorial approval and suggestions from myself and the classroom assistant after reviewing their thumbnail sketches first done on scratch paper. Then a third individual gets to ink the page in using a variety of techniques and textures, including different line weights and utilizing a range of tools. Lastly a fourth student adds the finishing touches of value with a wash, which in many cases really helps to unify the piece and compliments the artwork quite nicely. Meta-lessons included the potential benefits in working with other creators: playing off of each others relative strengths and compensating for any possible weaknesses. Say for example you have great ideas but are unsure how best to illustrate them, or conversely have mad skills but no material to work with. Comics is one of the very few mediums where a team approach can result in a finished piece that draws upon a unique melting-pot approach (synergistic effect).
   All of these collaborative pages were then displayed in the main hallway for the Academy's closing exhibition. While we didn't have anything in the gallery proper, our classes were a continuing presence in the high-traffic areas of the department throughout the duration of the camp, making for an effective and entertaining visual aide that doubled as promotional and inspirational images to the rest of the attendees along with anyone else on campus.

Image: Jamie, Tara, Trinity, Callie

   Between both classes the students in one day drew a total of two hundred-sixty-four doodles (characters, objects & scenarios) on index cards w/Sharpies, in addition to sixty-four individual panels AND completed twenty-two comic strips of 3-5 panels long. In an hour-and-a-half no less. One of the potential benefits to burying everybody alive in a flurry of index cards and a blizzard of copier paper was to effectively short-circuit the inner critic, which continuously mutters away in the background while attempting to hamstring any progress. Bypassing that internal monologue and silencing the committee means you just concentrate instead on producing pieces: it's the work in artwork. Such a total joy to turn ‘em loose on something they have fun doing + keep pushing for more & more… it’s just amazing to see how much work they can crank out...

   One of the side-benefits of producing such an insane amount of material is the generation of my oft-cited "mulch-pile" which is an ever-growing repository of potential inspiration and raw fodder for anything and everything. There is simply no shortage of ideas: many times I would take students out and kickstart the process of stitching together random concepts, weaving them into narratives which ranged from the utterly ridiculous and nonsensical to insightful and provocative. These cue-cards could be utilized as starting and/or end points in whatever story they wanted to tell, or instead they could serve as a seed which would then germinate in all sorts of directions. The repeated question while before this veritable altar of artistic ideas was always "What if?" Whatever you could possibly imagine, from sci-fi, horror, adventure, romance and humor, to abstracted imagery without any structured meaning and completely open to interpretation. Art, in other words.

   As I mentioned earlier, anyone who took the time to wander through the art department up at UAF got to check out firsthand the CARTOON CONTAGION that spreading inexorably throughout the hallway display cases. They featured pretty much everything produced during the classes, and there was still a veritable compost heap of material piled up on a table in the studio. In addition to this they also accrued a compilation of copies from which to get additional pointers and resources.

Image: Nicole

   How to earn a Gold Star in a cartooning class: doodling a delightful caricature of the instructor. That said it's probably the only class they’ll ever have where they are encouraged to make fun of their teacher. Evidently I’m somewhat of a disheveled weirdo at 8am, which is not to say that there's any improvement in charisma as the day progresses.

Art by (ccw): Fin. Zee, Callie, Nicole, Gabby, Trinity

   Here's a handful of samples from the single-panel/gag and strip portion of the classes, excerpted from the official class comic book which was published at the end of the Academy, just in time for a release party on the last day. It was a carrot at the end of the stick after making everyone complete a minicomic, which was then copied and folded for an exchange amongst the students. Between those, another comic book containing all the collaborative pages, a set of copies detailing the progressive stages in my demo panels and a batch of handouts, everybody wound up with quite a bag of memorabilia.
 

Art by: Fin, Gabby, Zee, Hailey

   As with all my studio courses during the regular semesters, while students are working away on their assignments, and in-between questions, lectures and critiques, I’ll have ongoing pieces I’ll be working away on in the background that they can always take a break and check out for a few minutes (or peruse the rotating library of books brought in from my stash at home). It’s pretty cool for them to be able to see firsthand the whole progression right up to the published version that’ll run in the newspaper shortly after the session ends.

   “Eco-logger” + “Extensions”: sample work-in-progress panels that document the in-class evolution from initial doodle in sketchbook to the pencil stage, the inked version to the digital variation for published feature and finally treatment with a wash/watercolor on the original line art. For this pencil stage they can really see how fluid the evolution of the drawing is, and how instead of it appearing as if by magic outta the end of a pen it actually takes a bit of preliminary work playing around with building up basic, simple shapes, gradually refining the composition until it gets to a point it’s ready to ink. Also they get to see firsthand how much more of a "suggested serving" that is when it gets inked over: more often than not it's never really about "tracing" per say, just a template to keep in mind while pursuing the original concept. Hopefully - ideally - all the kinks are worked out early on in the doodle, but there's always intermittent phases in which to modify the panel. That includes comparing/contrasting the relative aesthetics and effectiveness of the wash versus the computer versions: in this case I totally bombed on one of the two demo pieces, but the saving trade-off was in having a comparatively much better digital variation. Incidentally a great meta-lesson in how upping the volume of output equates with a better buffer-zone of good material - it's just a case of increasing the odds you'll A) have a good one and/or B) back yourself up in the event of a tragedy.

   Many thanks go out to the rest of the faculty, Dean Sherman and special thanks to Diana for staffing the gig + most of all my outstanding studio assistant Tara. Also on a personal note, I serendipitously caught what for me is perhaps one of the most edifying moments of my entire career: a detail snuck into the contract paperwork that marks a momentous change of official status from a lowly and humble adjunct to a much more auspicious title: 

Postscript: So the first Monday after the Visual Art Academy was over, I stopped by the local independent bookstore, and scored a few used graphic novels (Jessica Abel’s “La Perdida,” Keiji Nakazawa’s “Barefoot Gen” and “The Left Bank Gang” by Jason) and was sitting in the café sketching some cartoons when I spied one of the students working with her laptop… writing a script for her own book.
That's what it's all about folks.

2013 Visual Art Academy: Highlights & Notes

Just wrapped up my first time teaching cartooning at the UAF Visual Art Academy (one of the many such summer camps offered in the Interior community): what a kick in the creative pants those kids were! There were some absolutely fantastic works by a wide range of different styles and skill levels - including some truly astonishing abilities by a several students in particular that it was a genuine joy to see the work of. The two morning classes ran an hour-and-a-half each for two weeks, five days a week, with 8-9 students per session, from 6th-grade to juniors in highschool (from Lathrop, Hutch, Ryan Middle, Hunter Elementary and homeschooled).

Big thanks to Lee Post (esp. for the Ivan Brunetti tip) and Robin Feinman for the assist: after getting called up on short notice I was apprehensive on being prepared, but with some helpful tips and culling reworked/scaled-back exercises from previous cartooning courses and workshops I think it went well enough. Extra-special thanks go to all the behind-the-scene folks who helped facilitate the academy and Director Todd Sherman - it's a huge endeavor especially condensed over such a comparatively brief time. To pick just one highlight, it was awesome to see the reaction of four of my students whose classwork adorned the annual tshirt design (and great job on such short turnaround Trademark Screenprinting).

True story: You know your cartooning class rocks and everybody's really really into what they're drawing when there's a freakin' earthquake and nobody even notices. Most days I got the distinct impression that most of the students attending this camp would have been more than happy just left alone to draw whatever comics that they had cookin' up on the back burners in their brains.

I usually spent time after class making copies and posting student work up in the hallway display cases. Cumulatively this meant a veritable wallpapering of the department, and we didn't even need to have submissions to the gala gallery exhibition on the last week of camp, we just showcased the collaborative script/pencil/ink/color pages in the main hallway, and kept up a smorgasbord of samples from other assignments in the secondary cases.

Spreading like an infection throughout the department halls

Random things learned: My beaver "chop" logo actually looks like a cyclops with buckteeth; "gag" cartoons are called that because if you eat them, they will in fact make you gag; a front/back/side and 3/4's view of a character design doesn't work all that well if your character is an egg; also got turned onto Ross Campbell's "Wet Moon" and Guy Delisle's "Burma Chronicles."

I did an informal poll during the second week, to ask specifically "What do you wanna know/learn how to do/get out of the class" so as to maybe better inform my lesson plans in the future, and got back a wide variety of responses: how to draw people (not stick figures), how to be funny, panel arrangements on a comics page, how to make people laugh their pants off, nothing in particular... just everything, draw human people and faces in proportion, the business of cartooning, how to draw people kissing each other, and a whole bunch of "nothing, just draw cartoons."

Random poll of their personal favorite cartoons was revealing in its breadth and depth: Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro," Garfield, Kibuishi's "Amulet," Pearls Before Swine, Calvin & Hobbes, Scott Pilgrim, Cartoon Network's "Samurai Jack," Kishimoto's "Naruto," Zits, Shan's "Cirque du Freake," Kagesaki's "Chibi Vampire," The Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob Squarepants, Tom & Jerry, and My Little Pony.

More notes below the fold...

1-pagers + Comic Poems: "Whereas" (aka "Proclamation"), "Wish You Were Here," "Cognitive Cryogenics" & "Robot Beavers"

Here, on the darkest day of the year, is some illumination by way of letting in a little light + levity. The buffer zone helps keep me sane, if not alive (speaking of darkest days). 

First up is a side-piece done not as a demo per say but an insurance policy on the collaborative page exercise in the Cartoon & Comic Arts course this semester. So as to ensure an unbroken chain of participants during each successive stage (script > pencil > ink > color), I will usually have an emergency backup prepped up in case anyone misses a class for whatever reason. I had an advanced student knock out a simple script on the day it was due, and then penciled in the page, and when nobody missed a session for any other stage along the path of production, went ahead and inked and (digitally) colored it as well. Note there was a lot of artistic liberty taken with my interpretation of the script.

I wanna take this opportunity to mention some meta about doing this assignment: aside from experimenting in the possibilities with collaborative aspect of comics (not many other mediums allow for such a process resulting in an amalgamation of imagery), a simpler point is made. That is how much you might get out of just doing random, weird exercise - at the least you'll have drawn something you never thought of before, and may very well wind up with a really unusual and creative creative synthesis.  

"Cognitive Cryogenics" was a collaborative exhibition up at UAF between Professor Sasha Bitzer and Ayona-Reily Dixon, a current art major student in the department. I couldn't take my Beginning drawing class on their semesterly field trip to the Bear Gallery (bonus 64th Parallel show was up, a dependable cornucopia of creativity + inspiration), but there was an outstanding show in our own gallery. When I was visually sampling & remixing some interesting textures on display, the individual titles for the pieces were not up yet, and so literally drew more from inference as far as the verbage. Sometimes it is a gateway into abstraction, like an artistic moulin.

Similar if not the same essential concept is at play with the comics poetry unit - now done as an exercise in all Beginning classes, not just in the Cartoon & Comic Arts course. These days when teaching in the studio, "See what happens" is my usual MO... try something new. This particular in-class exercise is so much fun to see spontaneous stories unspool - you never really know what will come out of the collaboration.

Like this last one, another impromptu page done during demos (reminiscent of "Costco," a recent Lamb of God mashup, and "Empty Spaces" too), for the semesterly landscape gesture exercise. I often go off on my own, whether in the woods or classroom, and wander about, doodling.

Fifteen Years of Ink & Snow

Tomorrow will mark fifteen years of posting punny pics + accompanying cartoon commentary. Thought I'd take a moment to say thank you to the regular readers, I always appreciate the eyeballs.

Made way back in 2016 during a Visual Art Academy course, this one-pager piece was done as a demo for the Cartoon & Comic Arts class. It was initially conceived on the spot as an emergency last-minute backup to the in-class exercise for our week-long “collaborative page” unit. This is when I orchestrate a section of the course for getting a taste of a more traditional team approach to creating comics: one student does a script for a one-page, 3-5 panel comic, then a second randomly selected student will in turn pencil the page out, followed by a third and fourth student respectively inking then coloring what turns into a really neat amalgamation of talent and skill. This particular demo page laid around the office a number of years before scanning it last year, and then it again randomly resurfaced on a search of my desktop for an unrelated image. I just used it to warm up for some other coloring work, and so can now show it in the studio classroom to illustrate the full process. A note that the selected excerpt is sampled from a particularly appropriate piece by poet Tom Hubbard, and the other two stages sketched/inked by a couple of amazing former students Tara and Amanda, both incredible artists in their own right these days. 

On another side-note soon I'll hopefully have some exceptional news to share with folks about a long-held dream coming true. It follows on a recent ascension in the academic ranks to the degree that one of my official duties is creating not just artwork, or art majors, but curriculum development as well. The posted pics are snapshots from the studio classroom when we move from experimenting with comics poetry into the sequential art/comics portion of the semester: the buffet of sample comics on the main display table in the center of the studio, and the ever-growing pile of sample student comics from previous semesters. 

Relatedly, here's another example of the particular effectiveness in this medium with of one of the many in-class exercises I frequently use in the studio to demonstrate how to guide a viewer/reader through a sequence of images that transport us on a journey through time and space itself. "Behold the power of comics!"

Recap: Visual Art Academy 2016 + Magical Mondays

A couple highlights from the crazy summer season of sandwiching in some miscellaneous cartooning gigs: another two-week session teaching two classes at the UAF Visual Art Academy (see 2015 recap here + 2014 linkage too).

Recap: Cartoon & Comic Arts 2015

   Just going to do one motherlode post here to try and encapsulate the UAF Summer Sessions Cartoon & Comic Arts course (see backposts under the topic index here) in it's entirety as much as possible. Fifteen folks enrolled this year - now in it's ninth - including four at the Advanced level - but by no means was that skill-set designation restricted to them alone, as the overwhelming majority of the "Beginners" displayed some truly amazing talent. Mainly what separates the two divisions is the scale + scope of the individual efforts with regards to their independent projects, in addition to the incorporation of color, and utilization of the web for self-promotional purposes. More on them later - but for now follow me below the fold for an overview of this session's activities and highlights...