Comics for kids, by kids.
We’re feeling festive at Salford Comics Club!
For our starter activity this month, we asked everyone to imagine what could be in some oddly shaped presents from Father Christmas.
We then tried to re-imagine the Christmas story set in a different environment.
We saw Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus as they might have looked in space, in the jungle (arriving on a lion and zebra), in prehistoric times and even in a computer game!
In commemoration of the centenary of the Armistice, this month’s Comics Club was all about history.
Kids were tasked with choosing periods from history and designing characters that would fit into that historical period.
As a prompt, they could then also choose a different period/character and try and think of a story where those two characters would meet. What would they be doing? What would they say to each other? How would they interact?
This month’s starter activity, taken from ComicsClub.blog’s September Comics Challenge, was to draw yourself as random things!
Continuing with the theme of random things, we then asked the children to select and draw two random things from this list of random categories:
The children then had to find a way to link those two things in a story/comic. Should they combine the two objects to create an interesting character? Or should the story revolve around those two objects? Or should one object be the character and the other a tool?
This month’s Comics Club explored shapes, and how you could build characters and settings from relatively simple shapes.
The task was to draw a simple shape and then turn that shape into a character. The children then had to draw another shape and turn that shape into the character’s home/habitat.
We then had to design a story around our shape-based character and habitat – how did that character come to live there? What does the character do there? What is it like on the inside?
This month, we looked at how we could create our very own fantasy creatures. We each drew our favourite animal (real or fictional) and then drew another animal from the following animal classes:
The task was then to find a way to combine elements of those two animals to create our very own fantasy creatures – and we had some brilliant creations!
This month’s Comics Club session was all about stories. We explored how stories all have a beginning, middle and end, and how we don’t always have to start at the beginning.
We started our session with some sound effects, like ‘aargh’, ‘whoosh’, ‘bang’, ‘zzzzt’ and ‘roar’. The task was to choose a sound effect and design a character that would produce that sound.
We then had to base our story/comic around that character. We used our action Story Cubes to help us devise some creative story ideas – rolling one die for the beginning and one for the end and trying to join the dots.
Our first ever Comics Club session at the Height Library saw some fantastic creations by some fabulous kids.
We explored drawing different emotions and creating our very own characters, using some key questions to help shape our ideas:
Kids then used these ideas to create their own short comic strips.
