In case you were unable to join us for our tenth Drawing Together event, here is a recap of the exercises we did together.
Our host was Alex Thomas, GMIC board member, physician, and cartoonist. With his partner Gary Ashwal, Alex creates educational comics for their company, Booster Shot Media.
Our warm-up exercise was a blind contour drawing. They are always fun! Here are the directions: (5 minutes)
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- Pick a nearby object
- Fix your eyes on the outline of the object and track the edges with your eyes. At the same time, draw each contour you see very slowly, in a steady, continuous line without lifting the pen/pencil or looking at the paper
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Alex then gave us a quick but informative overview about making effective educational comics. He shared several examples that utilize one or more of the following methods:
For our main exercise, we created educational comics about something we have learned in the last few months. Alex led us through the process stepwise, sharing his own example comic-in-process.
#DrawingTogetherGM
You can find more information about Booster Shot Media and see some of Alex’s work at the links below.
Links that emerged from sharing in the chat or from Alex’s introduction:
- Systemic Racism Explained (cartoon)
- How to Make an 8 Page Zine
- Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
- Octavia’s Brood (Black speculative fiction)
- In My Language (on communication)
- The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
- Racism in Medicine Dating Back to Slavery
Really interesting feature, Alex, do you do the cartoon drawing on paper fist and then scan into a software programme or straight into digital? What software drawing programme do you use or recommend.
Thanks.
Hi Rob! For the past few years, I’ve been working nearly exclusively digital. I primarily use a Wacom cintiq drawing tablet with my Mac on use Adobe Photoshop (I found that having a sketch layer that I could then digitally ink over was much more convenient than scanning in my pencils and then digitally inking on top of that). I recently got an Ipad pro and have been working on that using the Procreate App. Hope that helps! I highly recommend each program for their respective platforms !