Comics Making for Life

Comics Making for Life is a course that facilitates the creation of unique comics! We learn to design and implement effective comics-making workflows to harness the ideas and life that flow around us.

It's a great way to participate in a community of people who care about creating personal comics that push the boundaries of their personal practices.

💬 Description

In this class, we’ll explore constraint-based comics-making.

We'll focus on using the same comics grid, the 6-panel grid, throughout the course. This will allow us to work quickly and intuitively in a way that will allow you to focus on the intricacies of this fertile and flexible compositional structure.

Each week there will be 5 daily prompts that will invite you to make new comics that you will share in a private forum. You will be able to workshop your ideas iteratively in this small peer cohort. Prompts will initially come from the instructor but will eventually be generated collectively.

This course places an emphasis on quantity over quality. The aim of this will be to help you find the comics-making practices that are best suited to you as an individual. So that you can truly keep making comics for life.

🏆 Objectives

• Create a 16+ page print and web-friendly zine of your own comics.
• Learn how to develop a robust, yet flexible + sustainable personal creative practice.

📖 Artifacts

• Each participant will get to put together a 16+ page print and web-friendly zine of your their newly created comics.
• We will collect highlights of the work made during this cohort to make a collaborative zine that all participants will receive print copies of.

🤔 Who is this class for?

This is not a class for careerist comics makers. We will not focus on professional practices. We're not going to get into the entrepreneurial aspects of comics-making. We will not talk much about publishing or the comics industry. There are plenty of communities on the web focused on that already. This club is for people to get personal with their comics. 😇

Are you looking to develop your own personal comics practice? Do you want to spend time learning how to braid images and words together to communicate thoughts and emotions?"

Are you looking for a fun group with which you can make comics on the regular?

Are you in search of a community of makers that are interested in reading and discussing zines, Instagram comics, webcomics, graphic novels, memes, and more?

This class is for you. ✨

👀 Length / Commitment

The course is 5 weeks long and meets once a week for 2 hours. This class requires work outside of our weekly meetings. Each week you'll need to dedicate an additional 6-12 hours to make 5 pages of comics in response to the prompts that we will work from.

🏗️ Structure

• 6-12 students
• 2-hour lesson sessions for 5 weeks
• 6-12 hours of extra work outside of our sessions
• Multiple weekly open-studio style co-working sessions for completing work.

🛠️ Tools

• Paper and square Post-It Notes
• Pencils, Pens, and Markers (Nothing too fancy!)
• Scanner and/or a Phone with a Camera
• Laptop or Desktop computer for publication design in week 5

🗓️ Schedule

Ongoing: Open Studio Sessions

Every week there will be multiple work sessions where cohort members can hang out! These sessions will be there to help you make time for doing your weekly work in the company of others.

The idea for these open studio sessions is to replicate the solidarity and serendipity that emerges from being able to work in parallel with others on separate projects.

Week 1: Skills Bootcamp | Getting the blood flowing

Get to know your fellow studio mates and jump into the fray by making some quick and dirty comics!

On our first video call we will go over the structure of this course, expectations, and the theory behind it. The facilitator will explain how it will all come together in our publications.

Agenda

• We will begin with some fun drawing-based peer introductions, after which you will get the opportunity to identify your personal creative goals for the next 5 weeks.
• We will do some constraint-based comics-making warm-ups and will introduce modular comics-making during a 40-minute mini-workshop. This approach to comics-making is a technique you will get to experiment with throughout the course of this course.

During this week there will be 2+ open studio sessions where you will be able to get together outside of class and work on your homework together.

Homework: You will create 5 pages of comics in response to 5 constraint-based prompts from the facilitator.

Week 2: The Daily Flow | Constraint-Based Creativity

We will explore what it means to be like water when it comes to making comics-making. Our work this week will pull from Kyna Leski's work, The Storm of Creativity.

Agenda

• We will begin with discussing the past week's work and the conversations that occurred on the forum.
• We will have a conversation on what we find to be the impediments that keep us from getting into a state of flow with our comics-making.
• We will do some drawing warm-ups that will allow us to explore what it means to study the work of others in comics.
• We will then do a series of comics composition exercises that will fold in bibliomancy and collage.

During this week there will be 3+ open studio sessions where you will be able to get together outside of class and work on your homework together.

Homework: You will create 5 pages of comics in response to 5 constraint-based prompts from the facilitator.

Week 3: You Make the Rules | The world of OuBaPo

Dive headfirst into the world of OuBaPo! With this new knowledge, you'll be hopping into the driver's seat! After two weeks of making comics in response to prompts generated by the facilitator, we will dig into creating structures of our own that we can respond to with our comics-making.

Agenda

• We will begin by discussing the past week's work and the conversations that occurred on the forum.
• The facilitator will give a short presentation with slides as to the history of OuBaPo and its potential uses in personal art practices.
• We will collectively write a set of strange prompts in the form of specific creative constraints.
• We take up several of the generated constraints and will make comics in response to them as a group. The comics-making will be followed by sharing of individual work and discussion.

During this week there will be 3+ open studio sessions where you will be able to get together outside of class and work on your homework together.

Homework: You will create 5 pages of comics in response to constraint-based prompts generated by the group, along with 3 new potential prompts daily.

Week 4: Running the Marathon | Multipage Sequences

This week we will work on multipage sequences and will explore the unique challenges they present. Up to this point, all of our comics will have been single pages.

Agenda

• We will begin by reviewing the past week's work and the conversations that occurred on the forum.
• We will do some drawing and writing warm-ups.
• We will have a discussion that will invite you to reflect on the thought processes you use when creating comics. This will help us identify what kinds of workflows will be best for you when trying to tackle multi-page sequences.
• We will do an hour-long stream of consciousness comics-making mini-workshop that will introduce the use of composing comics using page spreads to your practice.

During this week there will be 3+ open studio sessions where you will be able to get together outside of class and work on your homework together.

Homework: You will create a single 6-page sequence of comics.

Week 5: Sharing is Caring | Print and Digital Publishing

Honor yourself and all the hard work you've done by learning how to share your comics both physically and digitally!

Agenda

• We will begin by reviewing the past week's comics and the conversations that occurred on the forum.
• We will have a short presentation on core principles of publication design, scanning and photographing work, file management, pagination, and sharing to the web.
• There will be a live demo on the use of InDesign and Scribus to layout a simple zine from start to finish.
• We will take some time to quickly draft ideas for the front, back, and interior covers of our publications.

During this week there will be 4+ open studio sessions where you will be able to get together outside of class and work on creating your web and print-ready publications.

Homework: You will design and lay out a zine of the work you've made in this course that you will be able to share physically with friends and family and online with the world! (You will continue to have access to assistance from the facilitator after the end of this course.)