Jonathan R. Aubin
Begin class by distributing sketchbooks. Explain to students that they will be expected to bring these to class and encourage students to take and use them when they leave. Emphasize that sketchbooks are for their use. Decorating, doodling, brainstorming, writing, drawing, or painting in the sketchbook is necessary to success in class. There is no such thing as a bad idea or bad drawing. Think of a sketchbook as a launching pad for your ideas (see Figure 1). Who knows where they may take you?
Drawing Exercise 1
For your first piece, you will draw a self–portrait in pencil. We will be using pencils because it will be easier to fix our mistakes and most comic artists do their original sketches this way. If we want a more professional feel, we can write over our pencil drawings with ink later. This is a process called "inking," and it is what separates a sketch from a finished piece. We won't be working with ink today, but you might want to try it on your own later, or experiment with different art supplies like colored pencils, pastels, or watercolors.
Our focus today is on creating a steady line, understanding how a line can be thick or thin, rigid or flowing, messy or neat (see Figure 2).
Find a line that suits you. Draw at a pace that is comfortable. Don't rush. Focus on making simple shapes. Use these shapes to create objects and people. A tree, for example, is simply a triangle plus a cylinder. A house is a square and a triangle. Mastering these simple shapes will help you get a feel for proportion and perspective. For the next two minutes sketch cylinders, rectangles and triangles. See what objects you can create from these simple shapes.
Share student self–portraits.
Read
Understanding Comics
by Scott McCloud, pp. pp. 118–125 "Living in Line"
Closure
Assign students one of the following book–length graphic or illustrated novels:
Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi (Volume I),
The Absolutely True Diaries of a Part–Time Indian
, or Maus by Art Spiegelman (Volume I). It is a good idea to assign daily reading benchmarks, so that students are literally on the same page in their small groups. Before students leave class, have them answer the following question in their sketchbooks: What are the tools necessary to becoming a graphic artist?
Homework – Drawing exercise 1A
Draw ten different emotions, e.g. happy, sad, angry, nervous, depressed, annoyed, excited, guilty, tired, and bored. There are two reasons for this assignment. First, experimentation will allow students to get a feel for how lines create emotions. Also, drawing exercises will emphasize the importance of practice and repetition. Drawing consistent characters and objects, no matter how simple they may appear, is incredibly difficult, as anyone who has attempted a to draw a comic will attest.