Cartooning & Comic Book Creation With Alex Shapiro (Ages 8-12)

Fall Semester Classes Schedule: September 20th - December 13th

Teaching Artist Alex Shapiro

Cartooning & Comic Book Creation (8-12)| $369

Saturday Ages: 8 -12, 11am - 12pm

Turn your drawings into dynamic stories and characters that leap off the page! This engaging and creative class invites young artists to explore the exciting worlds of cartooning and comic book creation.

The ultimate goal of this course is for students to create a complete, original comic book utilizing text and sequential artwork to either tell a story or visually address a theme.

Learning Objectives:

• Originality: Learn the difference between creating original art and writing and copying or interpreting another person’s work.
• Character design (Faces): Design original characters and how different facial expressions convey emotions, intentions and personality.
• Figures: Develop original figures and how different body movements convey emotions, intentions, action, and personality.
• Backgrounds and Perspective: Create settings that convey the location, conditions, and mood of the story.
• Lettering: Explore effective, appropriate and aesthetically interesting lettering for communication for comic books.
• Layout and Design: Master various techniques of layout and graphic design for comic books including cover, title, and transition design for comics.
• Shadow, Tone, and Color: Develop techniques to indicate shadow, tone, and color, and how to use shadow, tone and color to give more realism and depth and power to their drawings.

Tell a story using sequential art techniques that combine drawing and text together for effective communication, ultimately creating a comic book with a singular theme and effective presentation of your ideas.

Meet The Teaching Artist: Alexander Shapiro is a professional cartoonist and illustrator whose work has appeared in various publications and websites, and whose clients have included CBS-TV, The San Francisco Chronical, The Central Park Conservancy, and the Department of Environmental Protection. He has taught cartooning, graphic memoir, illustration, animation for teaching clients have included The Museum of the City of New York, The Queens Museum, The California College of the Arts, Marymount Manhattan College, and The DYCD Heroes Project as well as as a resident artist in the New York City public school system.

Host or Publisher Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL)