Long time no blog… February 2020

We haven’t stopped working with children in Salford – just had a brief hiatus and (to be perfectly candid) struggled a little bit with attendance.

We are now back running regular monthly sessions, this time at Swinton Library, and this week, we focused on costume design.

A character’s costume or outfit can tell you a lot about them:

• where they are (climate)
• when they are (time period)
• who they are (rich/poor, occupation)
• what they’re doing (anything they might be holding?) and
• what they’ve been through (i.e. Are their shoes scuffed? Have they travelled far? Is their armour dented?). 

We put some of these thoughts into practice and tried to come up with our own costume/outfits for characters that would tell us a lot about their story, and see if that could inspire some comics.

The kids came up with some great ideas – from Ancient Greeks to Victorian superheroes to anthropomorphic cat chefs. Check them out below!

We ended the session, as usual, with the drawing game – and we think Bubbles the octopus alien clothes-drying genie with fire superpowers might be one of our favourite characters yet!

June 2019

This month’s Comics Club was all about food! We challenged everyone to come up with ideas for some quirky and cool food items, using the activity sheet below.

We had to think about what our meal would be called, how much they would charge for it, and most importantly who the intended customer was and therefore what was in it. What resulted was food designed for fairy dog princesses, robot slime and everything in between. See some of these great ideas below.

We then all had to design how our meal would look on the plate.

And finally, we had to imagine that we were all part of a food festival, and think about some ‘what if’ scenarios to help us come up with a story to draw our comic about.

• What if you ran out of ingredients?
• What if your head chef got the recipe really, really wrong?
• What if you had an unhappy customer?
• What if you joined forces with the stall next to you?

Here are some of the comics:

See you next time!

April 2019

A really full session today for Salford Comics Club with a total of 18 kids attending! Thank you all for continuing to come to our little club – we love seeing it grow.

This month was all about our Mix-Up Mayhem Machine. You can download the printouts for this below – simply cut the sheet into four.

As a group, we came up with ten items for each of the following categories:

• animals
• vehicles
• mythological creatures and
• household items.

We then started off at the beginning of the machine by drawing one of the items from one of the categories. The kids could then choose to add to those items by adding a middle segment of the machine, and drawing something from a different category.

They could keep going for as long as they liked, using more middle segments, or choose the final piece to finish their machine. They then had to mash up or combine all of the previous segments into something, and use that to inspire a comic.

As always, we had some really great ideas – here are just some of them!

 

March 2019

We had fantastic fun finding out about alliteration at this month’s Comics Club session. We challenged ourselves to design some crazy characters for our comics, asking questions like:

• What is their name?
• What are they?
• Where did they come from?
• What can they do?

The catch? We had to do it with words beginning with the same letter!

Check out the worksheet below:

We had some incredibly inspired ideas, including Mark the Magnetic Monster from the Moon, Super Jones the Super Hero from Super World with Super Skills, Jumping James Bond the Jellyfish from Jupiter and Chris the Chrissyan from Planet Cucumber.

Have a look at some of the comics:

 

February 2019

A great session today at Salford Comics Club!

Inspired by a strip in the Phoenix Comic by Jess Bradley, we decided to put the kids imaginations to the test – but instead of Jess Bradley’s Flurn Powder, we developed our very own Magic Potion.

Children had to decide what happened when this Magic Potion was poured on various objects, including a cat, a toaster, and Height Library itself!

They then had to think about several questions around the potion’s origin, which helped them develop their stories for their comics:

• What it was called
• Where it came from
• Who made it 
• Who had it now and
• What if… (Children were challenged to fill this in with ‘what if’ questions, like ‘What if it fell into the wrong hands?’ ‘What if it was lost?’)

The results were some amazing magical things – from potions created by aliens on the Moon and given to a zombie to potions that turned a toaster into Freddie Mercury from the ‘I Want To Break Free’ music video.

Have a look at some of these awesome creations below:

January 2019

Happy New Year, everyone!

This month, we challenged the children to design their comics around narration.

For a simple starter activity, we got everyone to draw:

• something you play with
• something you wear and
• something you eat

They then had to use one or more of these things as inspiration for characters.

The children then had to design a story around these characters, using these blank comic templates with thought/narration bubbles on them to help guide their story and move the action forward.

We had some fantastic ideas, from a Super Elf to a Cabbage Patch kid who could shoot cabbages out of their hands, cat-dragons and computer monsters. Check some out:

December 2018

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!