Aby-a-Day – December 2: Homework “Strip it Down” (Cartoon Tuesday)

Recently, I started a self-driven comic course using “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures“ by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden as my textbook.

I did the first homework assignment, “Drawing in Action,” a couple of weeks ago and the second assignment, “Gag Me,” the week before last. This week, we move onto strips.

In this assignment, we sketch out a three- to five-panel classic comic strip which lays out a character, a situation, and a punchline.

And, since the actual homework assignment was for a thumbnail sketch, rather than a finished cartoon, here’s the thumbnail I did for this one:

(Click cartoon to embiggen, or you can view all cartoons in Slideshow mode on Flickr.)

Aby-a-Day – November 18: Homework “Gag Me” (Cartoon Tuesday)

Recently, I started a self-driven comic course using “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures“ by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden as my textbook.

I did the first homework assignment, “Drawing in Action,” a couple of weeks ago. Here is the second assignment “Gag Me.” The instructions for this one are as follows:

Draw a 5″ x 7″ panel border in either horizontal or vertical orientation and create a captioned gag comic. When drawing the image, think about creating a sense of action, time passing within the panel, paying attention to reading order and image composition. Write at least three captions and choose the funniest one.

The caption I chose is in the voice bubble in the cartoon above. My other captions were:

“Uh…Tessie? How much longer do you want me to sit here? I really need to pee.”
and
“What?”

What other captions can you think of for this drawing?

Also, just for fun, here’s the original sketch I did when I was brainstorming ideas.

(Click cartoon to embiggen, or you can view all cartoons in Slideshow mode on Flickr.)

Aby-a-Day – November 4: Homework “Drawing in Action” (Cartoon Tuesday)

Recently, I started a self-driven comic course using “Drawing Words and Writing Pictures“ by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden as my textbook.

Even though I’ve been drawing cartoons my whole life, and I have a BA in Two-Dimensional Art from CSU Sacramento, I can always learn more. And none of my classes I took in college were focused solely on cartooning (quite the contrary, most of the time). The nice thing about this book is that is is an actual 15-unit course with homework assignments. I thought that I would share my homework as part of Cartoon Tuesday in hopes that it would motivate me to do them.

The first assignment is “Drawing in Action” and the instructions are as follows:

Draw a 5″ x 7″ panel border and create a drawing that contains the following elements:

• two characters
• one or more props (objects)
• an action and its result
• the reaction of one or both characters shown in facial expressions or bodily gestures.

Do not include any text.

So, here we have Angel knocking a bowl of dry food off the kitchen counter, raining crunchies down upon Jacoby’s head. What do you think?

(Click cartoon to embiggen, or you can view all cartoons in Slideshow mode on Flickr.)