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Part 4: Genres & Styles

Exercise: Create a Children’s Comic Character

Brief For this exercise you are to invent a character. there are three options for the character description: Young Detective Space Kid Animal Character Sketch up some rough ideas for each of these potential characters. Once you have sketched up some rough ideas, draw a finished colour character design (or digital drawing) on an A3 […]

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Part 4: Genres & Styles RT: Part 4

Research Task: ‘The True Story of Leopold and Loeb’

How does the style and narrative treat the real-life story? As funny, serious, or a combination of the two? I would describe the comic as serious in nature – it has a factual and impersonal tone. How is the story structured? How does it begin and end, and from whose perspective is it told? The […]

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Part 4: Genres & Styles RT: Part 4

Research Task: Life Stories

I looked at examples of the suggested educational comics: Look and Learn, Chick tracts and Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s-2000 (although I could not find many examples online for the latter). As the Look and Learn comics were created from the 1980s-1960s, I felt the illustrations looked quite dated and the style of […]

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Part 4: Genres & Styles

Exercise: True Stories

Brief This exercise is in two parts. Firstly, you need to decide on a famous person from history that you want to research. This could be a politician, royal figure, celebrity, pop star, inventor or sportsperson. It could be someone you already know a lot about or someone you want to find out more about. […]

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Assignment 3 Part 3: Structures and Stories

Assignment 3: Nine Panel Grid

Brief This assignment will bring together some of the experiments you have undertaken in the course’s exercises so far, where you have looked at comic structures and conventions like: The opening scene Character design Point-of-view Text styles of word balloons and text captions The silent comic Visual style The nine-panel grid is most famously used […]

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Part 3: Structures and Stories RT: Part 3

Research Task: Extreme Style

Research the following comic artists who are highly unconventional and extreme in their style; that is, they have a super-stylised and almost unique way if drawing that cannot be compared to anyone else in the comics’ field: Jim Steranko Aline Kominsky-Crumb Alex NiƱo Dave McKean Mary Fleener Frank Miller Basil Wolverton Choose two artists form […]

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Part 3: Structures and Stories

Exercise: Exercises in Style

Brief Find a photograph you like or are interested in drawing from. Try to choose one with figures, buildings and a lot of detail. The source or context is not as important as the richness of imagery and potential it offers you for visual interpretation. Photocopy or print your chosen image so that it is […]

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Part 3: Structures and Stories RT: Part 3

Research Task: ‘Silent Comics’

The two wordless graphic novels I chose for this research task were: My Book of Hours by Frans Masereel (1919) The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2006) Frans Masereel used woodcut prints to illustrate his black and white, graphic novel, My Book of Hours (1919), which creates very bold, definitive lines. I was impressed by how […]

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Part 3: Structures and Stories

Exercise: Speaking in Pictures

Brief Similar to the last exercise, you will be starting with a set text. This time you should pick a favourite song. Try not to choose anything too epic and it’s best if the lyrics have an interesting range of action or colourful description. First, listen to the song and answer the following: What mood […]

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Part 3: Structures and Stories

Exercise: Adapting Text

Brief Select a sequence of about three pages from a book you like. Try to think of a story you find visuallly interesting rather than something philosophical. Ideally it will include all different types of storytelling, so a story that includes dialogue, interesting characters as well as descriptions of places and objects. Try not to […]