Words + pictures

Week 3. My friend Will turned up, so that was nice. We could both be intimidated together.

This week we concentrated on how words and pictures combine variously in comics.

The first exercise was collaborative.First we had to write statements - something you overheard, advice someone gave you, a line from a song, the title of a film, etc etc - and to do different sketches. Something sad, something funny, something romantic, a famous painting, an animal doing a human activity.  Then we played around with different combinations of statement and picture.

Some of the work was very funny. The best was probably 'I ain't saying she's a golddigger' captioning a drawing of an old couple holding hands.

Here was my drawing of a famous painting paired with Will's film title.

I couldn't really remember what this famous painting looked like.













(it looks like this in reality)

Last week they'd all drawn models acting out scenes of conflict - escalating violence, from finger pointing to grabbing each other in a headlock.

To generate some ideas,  this week we had to draw different characters. One based on a square, one on a triangle, one on a circle. One human, one animal, one hybrid animal, someone wearing period costume, a historical character. (Can you spot my historical character?)

Then answer these questions about them:
Which two are in conflict?
How do they know each other?
What are three reasons why they are in conflict?

You can see I wasn't really interested in the shape characters. I'm not an imaginative doodler who comes up with crazy characters. Some people are gifted at this. I'm too boring.

I chose these two:

We then had to draw four panels on one page, showing the escalating conflict between them.
(please excuse the rotten photo quality. My fancy new phone doesn't take great pictures).

I decided that the dog works in the stables at Charles' manor house. The conflict between them is depicted below.