Comic Books Project
Grade level: 10th-12th grade
Duration: 6 hours daily, hybrid (students in person from 7:30-10:30 AM and remote from home (google meet) 12:30-3:30 PM)
Long Term Learning Target: I can create a narrative through art.
Supporting Learning Targets:
1. I can use art materials with intention, to illustrate a short comic book and sculpt an action figure.
2. I can design a protagonist and story of my own creation.
3. I can explain the meaning behind the symbolism within my narrative.
Guiding Questions:
How can you tell a story through art?
How can you create meaning through a narrative?
This project was taught at William Smith High School. WSHS is a project based learning school where students choose a 4 week long project that they partake in for 6 hours everyday. In the Comic Books Project, the students drew their own original narrative using alcohol based markers and micron pens and sculpted an action figure of their main character, to complete the comic universe they had created. Each day, students read and analyzed comics and graphic novels and discussed their meanings and their significance in our society as a whole. The students learned about character creation, plot outlining, story boarding/thumbnails and took many other steps before illustrating their final comic.
Press the button below to see a snapshot of a day in this project (GLE’s + state standards included):
Project prompt:
“In this sequential art project, you will be designing characters and the universes they live in! You will use them to create a narrative by illustrating a comic book and sculpting an action figure. This project combines both 2D and 3D elements to bring life to the stories you write. We will be looking at and analyzing comics, graphic novels, manga, animation, anime, etc, to inspire us in our storytelling journey!”
Daily Assignments:
Daily Sketch : each day they sketched from a prompt for 30 minutes to develop their personal comic style.
Comic Analysis: Each day they analyzed a comic/graphic novel and answered written questions that prompted class wide discussions.
Friday flipgrid critiques: Each Friday, the students would upload a flipgrid video where they evaluated their work that week and critiqued their classmates work in the comments.
Character Profile
In this assignment, students created an original character by using the prompts on the character profile to guide them. This character would be what they started drawing in their “Daily Sketch” assignments. Drawing and writing about their characters everyday made them think about their character more deeply, eventually transforming them from their original profile, into characters with more dimension. Student examples are in the slideshow below.
Initial Character Drawing
After completing their character profile, the students drew what they imagined the person they described would look like. Student examples are in the slideshow below.
Thumbnails
Above are images of thumbnail sketches that the students drafted. The purpose of this assignment was to give them a space to quickly sketch out what happens on each page and panel, so that once they started their final comic pages, they had a planned blueprint to follow.
Students working remotely on their comics (names are blacked out for privacy).
Final Product: Comic Books
Below is a slideshow of a selection of comic pages scanned in from the student’s final comic books. To see each comic in full, click the “FULL COMICS” button to view them all!
The students hand sculpted action figures based off their main character of the comic book using air dry clay. After the clay had dried over the weekend, they painted them using acrylic paint.
Final Product: Action Figure
Below is a slideshow of some of the action figures that the students created of their comic’s main character.
