Oodles and Doodles of Fun: Kids Have a Blast Working on Comics

October’s Write Club instructor Jen Hernandez, a gifted illustrator and teacher, describes how both she and the youth participants let their creativity run wild in this month’s workshop:

“I love to teach comics and work on my projects at the same time because I get super inspired by the creativity students bring to the class. I really love how these students explored really sophisticated themes of love, sadness, betrayal and the fear of being used by others; they had such incredible ideas that they shared freely with each other.”

The first half of the workshop focused on drawing and outlining skills for comics. Youth discussed stories they were working on, or story ideas they had in their heads, and Jen demonstrated how stories can be transformed into illustrations through visual metaphors.

The second half of the workshop taught students how to use thumbnails to plan out how their comics would look.

Jen kept things as close to what professional comic artists use as possible: she and the students used non-photo blue pencils and inking pens on bristol paper to complete their thumbnails.

Throughout the workshop, students showed each other their comics and shared constructive feedback.

The mood was overwhelmingly positive and fun. In fact, most of the kids wanted the workshop to keep going!

“I heard some really sweet comments like, “This is the best art class I’ve ever had” and “can we have one more hour?” when the workshop was over,” Jen recalls.

Comics are a great medium for writers, artists, and creative people to tell stories. The process of making art and crafting a storyline alongside the visual art encourages critical thinking, and greater empathy since you have to consider what the characters would look like on the page as they face different situations and feelings, and also consider how those characters will be perceived by different readers.

Jen Hernandez and the youth who participated in this Write Club demonstrated these skills to a T, and had oodles of doodles of fun as well!

Check out our upcoming Write Clubs for Youth!