Happy holidays! I hope this finds you doing well! As some of you may know, I have been busying working on creating comic book workshops with a micro-grant from the
York Region Arts Council, which helped to jumpstart this endeavour I had in mind for quite some time. I started designing them for beginners, as there is much interest from young creators looking at making their own comic books!
I have completed workshops that provide an overview of what a comic book consists of that includes going from idea to story, and story to script. I have hosted a bunch of these workshops with various aged participants with much success. For the last little while, I was looking at furthering the development towards my long-term goal of having a set of workshops that would stack skills and perhaps lead to full lessons.
The last workshop for 2020 I put together was a 3-day workshop for Figment Toronto where I invited artist Jason Lapidus to be a part of. Figment Toronto's usual 2-day in the park workshops and other artist engagements were turned into virtual events. So it was very new for them, as well as for us. No one knew how this would unfold and if it would be successful due to so many factors.
I'm happy to say that we were fully booked for all three days, with additional people wanting to join each day! Working with Jason, I was able to take the workshops I've done and add a unique aspect to them. That being the writer and artist production relationship which we showed as we worked through the stages from idea to page layouts from a script I created live along with participants. Jason showed his process of how he turns a comic book script into a page of layouts.
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Done live at the workshops by
Jason Lapidus. |
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Jason refined the layout of the
one-page story I wrote
at the workshops.
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Many moments stood out from those workshops from people creating amazing characters to showing their take on my script as Jason worked on it. My favourite though is the participant who decided to dive into comic books for the first time! She even when to a comic book shop for the first time to pick up a book I was going to recommend during the last workshop, which I normally do. There were also people outside of Toronto! We had people from the United States to Germany! Crazy when you think about how we're all able to connect and share the love of creating stories and art.
The enthusiasm and energy from everyone made this one of my favourite workshop instructing experiences for 2020. I look forward to furthering my workshop plans to involve more creators in hopes it inspires more people to dive into making their own comic book. Stay safe and stay creative!
If you would like to support my comic book workshop developments and or my creator-owned comic books, you can do that by making donations on my Ko-Fi page or by buying books I have on my shop there.
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