Saturday, November 03, 2007

Summer Cartooning Class

This past Summer, Brady finally got to take the Cartooning class she's been waiting to be old enough for, at the Orlando Museum of Art (They actually called for me to teach it, but I was too busy). On the final day, when I went to pick her up, she had this big poster board in hand with her project from the last few days. Their assignment was to come up with a story, and draw a comic page of it...
The story, she told me, is that a girl finds a lsot dog (Brady REALLY wants a dog these days), and the dog is sad. The girl takes the dog to the mall, buys him a collar, and then they leave the mall, and live happily ever after.

I knew something was "different" when I looked at this page, but couldn't determine what, exactly. I knew that it was odd that she'd made an unconventional panel arrangement that was still readable. But then, she pointed out to me, she'd made the story IN THE SHAPE OF A DOG.
.........

I was speechless. I have scanned in and highlighted the page here to the best of my ability (although it doesn't do it justice). Making unconventional pages, in the shape of the thing you're talking about? Geez! I didn't even know about this until college, when I read Will Eisner's books on storytelling. How on earth did she know about it?

I still don't know. And, I even asked...no, her teacher never said to do anything like this. She just came up with it. I guess all that comic book reading we've been doing rubbed off, somehow.

1 comment:

Sarah Kantz said...

That is amazing! Taking a complex form and being able to break it down into the primary shapes that compose the subject is very advanced! I still have to take a moment for pause before I see these shapes when I try this technique!

Even as a concept alone, that is a great story telling device! Very creative!!