Last night I took part in an Art Fair held at Country Side Grade School in Barrington, IL. My job was to make a demonstration of how to create a super-hero comic page. There were lots of activities and student art there. I wish I would have toured the student art in other rooms. I was in their multi-purpose area (notice the stage on my right). My demo took all my concentration so I stayed mainly in my corner.
The PTO organizers were very accommodating and high-school volunteers helped me set up in the well-lit area near the table (not shown) where kids were making Super Hero Buttons. Organizers had a sign for me (far left) but you'll notice I created my own.
I began the demo sketching a comic page layout. I did not have a story in mind but just started out with a super hero flying toward the reader. One of the attendees, a student named Daniel, who was sporting a classic super hero mask he had colored with markers at one of the activity tables, ask me "Who is that super hero?"
"Who do you want it to be?", I asked him.
"I think he should be Light Man", he said, "He looks like light would come out of his eyes".
"That's cool!" I said, "So, you think I should put an "L" on his chest and call him "Light Man"?
"Yeah!" confirmed Daniel, who then happily went off to play with the balloon sword he had gotten from yet another activity table (the balloon swords were a HUGE hit with the grade school boys while the girls were bigger fans of the masks).
That was enough to get me started on the story. I could only do one page so I decided to make it a cliff-hanger as you can tell from the panels. I made the initial sketch drawing using a blue high-lighter marker instead of a pencil so it could be seen at a distance. I had a lot of people watching me from chairs that had been set up around my station. It was definitely a kind of performance art. One dad asked me if his son could color the finished product. I told him he should take a photo with his phone and print it out later for his son to color. He liked that idea. It was a great size for capturing on an iPhone. Normally comic page original art is drawn on an 10"x15" (11"x17" with border) illustration board, whereas I was drawing my demo on a 26"x30" sheet.
After I sketched enough with the blue marker, I placed that page behind a clean sheet that was thin enough for me to see through and finished the inking with a Sharpie. It took me 30 minutes to do the sketch but an hour to do the inks. Daniel came back and liked what I had done. He really liked the name of Light Man's arch ememy, Shadow Shark. He looked for another page for the rest of the story and was disappointed when I told him I had time for only one page.
"On the next page you should have Light Man blast Shadow Shark with his eyes." Daniel offered, "Then Shadow Shark would fall out the window saying, 'Curse you, Light Man!'. You, know, like the villains always say."
"That would be a great story!" I encouraged as Daniel rejoined the other kids in the inevitable chasing and balloon sword play. I wondered how this experience of seeing his stories drawn out will influence him. Maybe he'll become a writer or artist. Or at least he'll have a great memory of that time when he was a kid and an artist took him seriously and made a story out of his idea. That could lead to a lot of good things.
Thanks to the PTO volunteer who took these photos and to the high school volunteers who helped me set up and put things away. And special thanks to Nicole Koviak, the head organizer who contacted and scheduled me for the event through Kaleidoscope School of Fine Art by way our Curriculum Director Alyane McNulty.
No comments:
Post a Comment