Sample Exercises

Connecting Ideas

For us, comics is about communication, and connecting ideas. We run a variety of exercises and projects designed to get students thinking complexly and to learn to integrate one communicated idea to another. Often this works by establishing two "plot points" and help students go from point A to point B. More often, it entails looking at ideas in a new way, and we frequently swap projects and build from a fellow student's story, or work from an existing solution to form our own new understanding.

Some Sample Exercises
(Click to jump to the specific exercise or scroll to browse.)

Beginning Exercises:
Warming Up
Two Panels, Then Three
Visual Metamorphosis
Character Telephone

Storytelling:
Tell a Strip in a New Way
From Nancy to Nancy
Start with Nancy
Breaking Routines
Cinderella
Scripting
Two Changes

Learning Intensive:
Interviews
Create a Story from Science Class
Create Comic from Bulleted Fact or Refresher List
Create a Log
Create a Story Using Facts from History Class
Movement Workshop
Scientific Experiments

Other Work and Games:
Jams
5- Card Nancy
Marathons

Beginning Exercises:

Warming Up
We often warm up by handing out sheets with geometric shapes peppered on them. The students make these into characters or other visual ideas. We look at how faces and bodies are made with a small number of marks on a page. And how simplicity is the essence of narrative communication with pictures.

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Two Panels, then Three
To get students used to the idea of delivering their ideas in sequential form, we begin with two panel assignments. Often, we hand out cards with panels printed on them, and ask the student to imagine a follow-up panel. Then we hand out blank cards and ask the students to work together to create 2 panel combinations that convey an idea. We focus this exercise by looking for action/reaction combinations.

From there we move to three panels, which is the beginning of complexity. We show how new dynamics can occur even in this small number of "beats."

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Visual Metamorphosis
From warm up drawing exercises like the geometric shapes, we then hand out sheets with two drawings of simple objects or animals and ask the students to create a "metamorphosis" between the objects. This entails inserting new visual parts and removing some at every step.

This build visual focus in the students, and it gets them paying attention to detail of all kinds, and then thinking about how they can apply their knowledge of the details at hand. Like many assignments, this is fun because they are under no pressure to "create", yet their solutions have to be creative.

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Character Telephone
We sometimes ask the students to create a cartoon character using the above methods. The students are then asked to hand their paper over to the next student who is asked to change one aspect of the character's appearance (and personality traits, sometimes.) The sheet is then handed around the room continuously, until it returns to the original creator. This version of "telephone" is a lot of fun for the students, and encourages them to see that from one idea, can sprout many ideas, and sometimes working on an idea can involve changing it and changing it until it says most clearly what you want it to. These exercises get students intimate with their own creative processes.

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Storytelling:

Tell a Strip in a Different Way
We hand out Sunday comic pages (usually from the 60s or earlier because frankly, we feel the quality of these stories is higher than many of today's strips) and ask the student to retell the story they have been handed in a different way. This can mean from another character's point of view, or as a flashback, or as a story in a story. We use this as a warm-up to doing this to their own projects. This encourages students to begin editing, to see every concept as something to look at from many angles and create a hierarchy of communication that is most clear and direct.

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From Nancy to Nancy
We often hand out two random panels from Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy to each student. They are told one is the first panel of their story and the other is the last. Their goal is to create a whole story unifying the two cartoon images they have been given. This is a cousin to visual metamorphosis, above.

This exercise is about connecting ideas, about stretching their imaginations and attention to create connections out of difficult juxtapositions. This exercise is always fun for students; they don't have to be so clever as to "think of an idea" or "use their own characters", they merely have to react to what is presented to them. Kids always turn out surprising, fun and smart stories working this way.

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Start with Nancy
We often merely use Nancy as story starters, too. If students have at this point created characters, they can graft those personages onto the figures in the Nancy panel and springboard to new realms. This often is gratifying for students. Creator Ernie Bushmiller's visual sensibility is so simple and direct that is often helps kid further understand what makes for clear communication.

Why Nancy? Click here to go to historian Scott McCloud's site, and scroll down to "Why Nancy?"

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Breaking Routines
We like to teach that storytelling is often about breaking routines. We create two panel comics that create a routine and then offer those works to our neighbors to break in specific and categorical ways like opposite, advice, surprise, etc. We sometimes continue this exercise until we return to the original "routine." This teaches students about natural rhythms in storytelling, about pattern making and pattern breaking, and frankly we feel it also encourages students to be more intelligently adventurous in their everyday lives.

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Cinderella
Cinderella is one of the most basic story structures, and after explain the patterns contained in it, we like to encourage students to create their own. We do this by asking them to create the story using existing panels of manga and other comics that we provide. This teaches students to see patterns and content where they might otherwise not. It helps them think metaphorically, complexly, and in patterns. It also helps them see the validity in adhering to structures that already exist.

An example of a page from the Cinderella exercise can be seen in the STUDENT WORK section.

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Scripting
Our two part lesson in scripting begins when we hand out a short story in one paragraph. We ask the students to script a one or two page comic story. They are asked to write the panel numbers, what is in the panel and what the text or dialogue is. They do this for every panel.

From there we hand out an array of visually striking photographs. We ask the kids to write a one paragraph story based on what they see, using the photograph as inspiration. We ask them to peek into the photo and look for details that might help them write their story. From there, we continue by asking them to script their story in the same manner as the first exercise.

Sometimes as a resolution, the students then hand their script to another student to draw.

The benefits of this large scale exercise is that students learn to think visually, learn to manipulate information in multiple languages at once. They learn to solve problems (how to depict or communicate certain actions and ideas) in a different medium than the one those problems are presented in. In other words: translation. Moving information from one medium to another is a complex process that teaches students a lot about problem solving and

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Two Changes

We tell students that two changes in a character generally makes an interesting story. One is often a surprise at the beginning of the story, and the second settles the story down at the end. This second one can also be surprising, but it usually tends to bring the character to a new ""ordinary state" or happily back to his or her older one.

This simple formula often gives children who feel unimaginative to instantly make a unique story that often surprises and delights them. This structure is a loose simplification of the structure of classic myths; the purpose of which has been to familiarize us with the patterns that life's obstacles and complexities often take. Storytelling is invaluable to us as humans. StoryArk workshops help kids integrate these understandings into their daily lives.

Read more about this exercise on page 4, Starting with Characters

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More Intensive Learning Through Comics:

Interviews
We ask students to interview friends or family or people in their lives. We ask them to bring records of their interviewers questions and answers, and from there we look to create a comic record of that interview. How much should we convey as monologue? What events should we depict fully? How do we depict the person's thoughts or impressions? This exercise works well with Historical Figures, below, and also the Log.

Two student examples of BIOGRAPHY COMICS can be see in the STUDENT WORK section.

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Create a Story Using Facts from Science Class
One way to use Science or History (for instance) information is to extract and list facts and then examine ways to craft a story that uses all of the learned facts. The best example of this that we are aware of is Jay Hosler's excellent Clan Apis! These comics by a biologist are about bees and cover many bee facts over the course of each story.

Fans of classic comics can click here to see the first few panels of this whaling sequence from Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy.

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Create comic from bulleted fact or refresher list.
One variation on the above is to create one panel for each bullet point at the end of a text book. This creates a story-less comic strip, but one which creates what sequential artists call an "aspect-to-aspect" work, where the narrative voice serves to find differing parts of a unique whole over the passage of time. Drawing keeps the easily distracted part of a student's mind occupied while the information sinks in. This is true of the teachers too. Both Lauren and Tom have been grateful for the learning they have acquired by visually studying and representing the real world.

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Create a Log
We often use this as a warm up to the History assignment, below. We record a log of our day yesterday, from when we woke up to when we went to sleep. We draw one panel for say, every two hours. By the end we often have a finished 6-10 panel comic strip.

At this point we ask the students to find the two panels or events that are the most interesting to them and we ask them to create that event using a sequence of at least 3-5 panels, and then to insert them in the proper place in their log.

The result is more rhythmic comic, and a student who has learned something about editing through additive measures, about the hierarchy of information in an essay, biography or story, and about rhythm in storytelling, and the value of changing that rhythm.

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Create a Story Using Facts from History Class
In a variation on the log assignment, above, to bring historical facts into the student's new vocabulary, we often ask them to create a log comic of a historical figure's life, or the timeline of an historic event. Then we work with them to find the two or three most relevant and informative details to flesh out.

This is also a good time to learn about using reference in drawing. Costumes, landscapes, and other historical details are worth getting right when they are being depicted visually by the student. We encourage proper research and help the students learn to find this information in libraries, on the web, etc.

Cick here to take a look at Jason Lutes' BERLIN for a professional example.

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Movement Workshop
Tracing Muybridge- In investigating and learning about depicting movement on a page, we usually start with Eadweard Muybridge, whose photos of people and animals in movement were the first to let people examine whole sequences of action in minute detail.

Dancing- We sometimes ask our students to draw their characters in a physical, 8 panel dance. This gets kids thinking physically, embodying their characters for the duration of the exercise. It also helps them learn to order things naturally. From their first drawing, what other drawings would make a logical follow-up drawing? We ask them to create a smooth sequence of gestures, which helps them think linearly and is great training for communicating and understanding gestures of human interaction. It's also tons of fun.

Two student examples of DANCING COMICS can be see in the STUDENT WORK section.

Cliff to Cliff- We often follow the dancing exercise with a jumping exercise, giving them one panel to begin with depicting a character on a cliff with a variety of objects around him or her. The students are then asked to get the character over to the other side. Many clever solutions come from this, including clever workings of the objects scattered around. Others grow super powers (slowly) and others are rescued after sending messages. This exercise is about sequence, like above, but also about problem solving, and often tells us a lot about the student's personalities and learning styles.

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Scientific Experiments
A good exercise is to ask students to explain a scientific experiment using silent comics. This is basically asking them to create an instruction manual. This helps students think about how to depict difficult or complex information in a straightforward way. This obviously also helps them to remember and be excited by the scientific experiments in question.

A variation on this asks a student to illustrate a household recipe in comic form.

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Other Games and Exercises:

Jams
Sometimes Just collaborating is the best way to learn. Students begin stories and hand them to following students to continue. The stories are continuously handed forward until they are finished. Like theater improvisation, we encourage these exercises to be about accepting other's offerings. Thus, we use the "Yes and... " rule, where we ask students to take the previous concept laid out by the previous student and ask them to accept and add to it. This always results in interesting stories that no one could have imagined on their own. It's great practice, it teaches cooperation and equality in the classroom, too.

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5-Card Nancy
5- Card Nancy is a game created by Comics scholar Scott McCloud, to spark interesting connections in storytelling. We start with a deck of isolated Nancy panels, and hand every student 5. The game is played by laying down successive panels to create a unique (and always bizarre, but often coherent) story.

Read more about this game here. Play a limited on-line version here.

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Marathons
Sometimes a marathon is the best way to be confronted with a concept. We sometimes ask our students to draw 4 whole pages in 2 hours. This encourages students to disregard the critical impulse in favor of letting them discover what they really think. It also helps them focus when they know there's an impending goal. Lauren and Tom have both seen this work when they themselves have participated in "24-Hour Comics", where artists are asked to create 24 complete pages in one 24 hour period.

You can click here to see one of Tom's "24-Hour Comics" in Flash format.

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