Diary Comics Workshop
Last weekend I taught a three hour Diary Comics workshop for my friends at Artist Book House. When the workshop was announced I had questions from readers about the possibility of running it remotely, and once it was filled I had a handful of requests to see if the workshop would be run again in the future. If it does run again or if I figure out a good system for zoom workshops I’ll share registration info here, but I don’t want my packed calendar to keep folks from getting started: here’s what we did, and I invite you to join at your own pace! Fellow comics educators, feel free to use any of these exercises for your own classes—the students responded really well to the prompts.
WARM UPS: Each student gets 5 blank index cards. First prompt: draw a self portrait in 3 minutes. After this, everyone shares an inevitable truth: they only drew themselves from the shoulders up! Next, they have to draw a full-bodied self portrait in 3 minutes, with a caption at the bottom sharing something they’re excited about in the coming week. (I demo an Ivan Brunetti style of drawing for folks uncomfortable with drawing full bodies quickly: large circle head, geometric body, squiggle limbs, plus identifying details). Then they do three rapid-fire additional self portraits on the remaining index cards, from Lynda Barry prompts, 3 minutes each: draw yourself as an astronaut in space! Draw yourself as a fruit, but not a banana because that’s cheating! Draw yourself as Batman!
DIARY SET UP: Every student got a simple saddle-stitched blank book to draw in and take home. On the first page, students were invited to take a little time to draw three self portraits in different environments, with different people.
DIARY PROPMT #1: Students are instructed to draw a 4 panel democratic grid (so, panels the same size) on the next page, with minimal space around the margin—we want the whole page to be filled with the panels. At the top of each panel, students write a question they think about all the time. They could be big, existential questions; they could be small, what-will-I-have-for-lunch questions. Then, in each panel: instead of directly illustrating the questions, they draw 4 steps of their morning routine. This helps students new to making comics think about the ways that non-diegetic text can be juxtaposed with the image, in ways that create new layers of meaning and different levels of understanding.
DIARY PROMPT #2: Students are asked to begin this section with free writing, connecting something that happened recently with something that happened to them long ago. Then they are challenged to boil the connection they revealed down into 8 simple, short sentences; then, drawing two more pages of 4-panels (so 8 panels total), turn those 8 sentences into an 8 panel comic. I suggest students think about what we learned in Prompt 1, about the way that image and text can tell different, simultaneous stories: the image could be in the past, and the text a current voice reflecting back on it; the story could jump back and forth between time in different panels; etc etc.
I didn’t review anyone’s comics: these diary comics are private, not just because of the possibly very personal content, but also because I don’t think it’s helpful to imagine an audience or an educator’s voice of critique when you’re first learning a new medium—you just need lots and lots and lots of practice, to experiment and make mistakes and find out what you want to say. (Adapting this anecdote from Art and Fear, the goal should be to make 80lbs of comics, not one perfect comic!) I make space for unobserved comics in my Art Institute class too: students have to keep a daily journal of writing & comics that I never read, just quickly flip through to check for completion.
Speaking of teaching: off to buy some India ink ahead of tomorrow’s inking demo, my old bottle froze and the ink got weird! Have a great rest of your week, I hope you draw some comics!
xox m
Oooooooh absolutely love the first prompt! I’m going to play around with it this weekend!