Ms. Eck informed us last week that she wouldn’t be in class today, and had a guest teacher scheduled, but we still decided to come since we felt we needed as much time with kids as we could get. So I don’t know if this is possible…but I do believe the number of students in the class has increased! I’m saying this because there weren’t enough seats all of a sudden, and one lucky girl got to use the teacher’s chair. I’d like to think that they all like us so much, that kids are ditching their other classes to join our Thursday design lessons. I can always dream that right? Anyway, today we passed out hand outs that showed and explained the various elements they must include on their comic book covers. Our focus with the students is to teach them how to design their covers, while they use ComicLife to make the rest of their comic book. This class was meant for them to do a lot of in class work on their covers. We gave them a time limit, and immediately collected their work when their time was up. There were some students who had difficulty with specifically what to draw, while some finished rather quickly. We ended this portion with 15 minutes left. In this time we asked one student to randomly pick a cover from the pile, and then point out to the rest of the class, if that particular cover fulfilled all the requirements we gave, and if not what was missing from it. We also asked what they noticed about the typography and images on the cover, and if they could guess what the comic book was going to be about. The rest of the class also joined in on the critiquing, and gave their comments and suggestions about that cover. We repeated this process with about 4 more covers.

We collected their storyboards again, and this time, the students were much farther along, and had done a significant amount of work on them. A lot of these kids are very talented with their concepts and drawing abilities. Its interesting to see how the contemporary cartoons and comic books of today, influence their drawing styles and story lines. I think the class was pretty successful, and was happy and surprised to see the students not shying away from critiquing eachother’s work, and in the end volunteering their covers to be critiqued by the class!