Comics Class at Dar Al-Fnon, in Nablus

Here are some images from my "good" comic class. By good I mean not only re the students exceptionally talented and quick to pick up on the concepts of comics, but also are very sweet, and mercifully quiet (in comparison to the controlled bedlam of my students at Al-Safeer). The first day was just introducing the medium to the students, and alot of them decided to draw stories about accidents for some reason.

The first class, unintentionally, had revolved around silent comics, so on Monday I focused on the interplay between words and pictures. The first exercise was the picture book creation described in this blog post, which was great. I didn't get any stories as creative as the one about the family factory or as touching as the lonely girl, but on the other hand they were very good at figuring out interesting ways to move the story foward, and immediatly grasped the interplay between text and images, going so far as to jump the lesson by incorparting dialogue (rather than simply the descriptions and prose story used in picture books). This was fine, as the next exercise I forced them to use panels with diagoue and panels with no text at all.

Today, the class focused around using different amount's of space or number's of panels to tell a story, as well as different angles that can be used to show a story. These were not quite as effective as before, but I think the students may have (hopefully) grasped the lesson itself, even if the execution of these ideas was not as great as some of their previous work.

Finally, they have begun drawing their final project: a great day in their life. This will use multiple panels and hopefully be a dynamic and creative final story.