Year One Comics Curriculum, part 1

Here's the first part of what I think the first semester of the first year of a three year comics curriculum should look like. I'm pretty much giving what I co-developed at Max the Mutt a failing grade, here. I had no experience developing a curriculum, just an understanding of what skills a comics artist should have at the end. The school administration wasn't nearly as much help as i would have hoped, since their vast experience running an animation school really just resulted in forcing bad choices and excluding necessary course changes where needed.

One thing that was a seemingly minor battle I lost at the time has really been a burden on the program; when it came to simply entitling the comics storytelling class, "Comics Storytelling" or "Storytelling for Comics" wasn't good enough. "Cinematic Storytelling" was pushed on me, and, honestly it didn't seem that big a deal at the time even though I'm not a big fan of buzz-words. Then I have to include mention of film in the course description because cinematic is in the title, blah, blah, blah. It did get to the point where I'd get a call to make some revisions to this-or-that document and I just did them without thinking. After all, they were the experts in all this.

Of course, two years later the point of what the course is gets buried in the stupid title and amendments to the initial course outline I wrote and the intructor gets told it's a film course and NOT a storytelling course.

All that aside, here's the breakdown of the weekly schedule. All classes are three hours long, with the exceptions of Comics History and Digital Media, which would be 1.5 hours long each. Some classes would have homework, others would be entirely in-class work, with perhaps some sketchbook work.

Monday
Introductory Perspective
Perspective is the backbone for all realistic drawing; it’s key to building the environments figures act within as well as building manikins and the objects they interact with within those environments. The first semester would develop a perspective vocabulary and hammer home the concepts of one, two and three point perspective.

Structural Drawing
Almost Introductory Perspective pt II, Structural Drawing is a course on simplifying complex objects down to their component shapes in accurate perspective then carving into or adding detail to get the final structure. The course would start with how to extract a sphere from a cube to building elements like furniture with a collection of blocks.

Tuesday
Introductory Object Drawing
This is the first of the “draw what you see” courses. Starting with a simple block, students will develop their hand-eye coordination as well as their critical eye by drawing increasingly complex real life objects paying attention to accurate perspective.

Design and Composition
Essentially a refinement of the design and composition course I created and developed over the last two years. Students would have in-class assignments to apply newly introduced concepts and have daily work in their “design journals” analyzing designs and compositions from the world around them.

Wednesday
Anatomy: The Simplified Human Form
This is the precursor to Life Drawing I and all the anatomy courses over the rest of the program. The students would learn the basic shapes and structures of the human body as well as the fundamentals of how it moves. This course would lean heavily on Bridgman’s approach and prepare the way for a more varied range of approaches in the subsequent course the second semester. An understanding of what’s happening within the form as well as some knowledge of proportion will allow students to make better use of their time with the model and allow them to develop into more advanced studies faster. The Nicolaides-derived curriculum I had to teach these past two years is akin to throwing babies into the deep end of the pool to teach them how to swim. It wasted a great deal of time with the model, for some students it wasted nearly a whole year.

Drawing Fundamentals
This would be an amalgam of lectures, slide shows, demonstrations, hand-outs and sketchbook work as many of the core elements of drawing are introduced. How to use line, line sensitivity, contour, mass, weight, tone, media and materials, etc.. Everything from how to sharpen a pencil to point construction to how to crosshatch would be introduced in this class.

Thursday
Storytelling for Comics
I’d probably just get Ty Templeton to teach the storytelling class he’s been doing for years (I wasn’t allowed to have it called Comics Storytelling back when developing the program at Max the Mutt, it was insisted that it be called Cinematic Storytelling and now they’re trying to get films shown in the class. MORONS! Let Ty teach what he does best! Sorry for the digression. . . .).

That’s not the best description, of course. This course would not just explain the basics of visual narrative, but it would cover the entirety of comics as a visual medium. Ty manages to connect everything from page flow to covers to drawing to comics history to give the student a great foundation in comics. Short of getting Ty to teach the course, I’d have Ty develop a full textbook for the semester. Yeah – I typed his name five times there.

Introductory Colour Theory
That’s pretty self-explanatory; students would study colour and do a number of exercises to enhance their experience and retention of colour mixing.

Friday
Comics History
A broad-stroke overview of the development of visual narrative from cave paintings to tapestries to the early comics to the modern era with attention paid to specific events and people who shaped the current medium and industry.

Digital Media
The course would start with a quiz to determine the computer and specific computer software knowledge of the student, the result would determine at which point the student would start attending the class, if at all. Starting with the introduction to the magical box, the course would move on to the practical uses of the computer in comics and then briefly cover and demonstrate what programs are most often used, specifically Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop.

Imaginative Drawing
Every week students would be assigned a drawing utilizing knowledge imparted over the course of the week. The emphasis would be on creating the fantastic to the best of the students’ abilities at the time allowing them to see practical application of the skills as they’re introduced, understood and eventually competent with them. At the end of the course, the students should have a dozen or so drawings showing their course-wide progress over the whole semester.

Of course, effort would be made to ensure that many of the classes are dealing with similar or overlapping drawing elements at the same time so students will be getting 3 or 4 versions of doing the same thing or solving the same problems some weeks.

~~~~~~~

I'll try to have the next part up within the week, and I'll get to the questions and comments people have been sending me about the school hopefully this week.

~R

Building a Better Comics Program

I really don't think the contemporary methods of teaching art is either healthy or developing. Institutions are either stangnant and entrenched in the methods that have been in place for decades or looking too far back in art history for a different answer to developing realist skills. perhaps, when faced with the zombie state of the modern visual arts curriculum, digging up the even older corpses of art programs is preferable -- if only to avoid the stench of decomposition.

I had never done any course development or actual teaching prior to being invited to help build the comics program at the Max the Mutt Animation School at the beginning of 2006. They were really looking for a two-year add-on to their established first year Visual Arts Literacy program. Already established programs from the animation curriculum would be plugged in as appropriate, as well. Plug and play. I didn’t know enough to know how bad those initial decisions were!

Anyway, the government forms describing the curriculum needed to be written without really knowing how long things would need to be effectively taught or who would be teaching them. Lots of guessing was made in order to make the approval deadline to announce the program for the 2006 fall semester. In retrospect, some of that guesswork was right and some was wrong. Hell, some was downright stupid.

However, now I have a certain amount of experience and I’m in a position to think aloud about what would make an effective and versatile comics curriculum. I don’t want to be a Utopian here; I want to think along the ideas of what would function in the real world so I have to start with some limitations:
A three year program.
A year consists of 2 semesters of 12-14 weeks each.
Students should have 6+ hours of classes a day.
Students shouldn’t typically expect to do more than an hour of homework per hour of instruction.

I’ll also have to start with some goals, but that raises the specter of what I consider a weakness in what I already developed. One of the big mistakes with the previous program is that the goals aren’t there. The program gives students a very broad range of knowledge and skills, but advancing requires competence in all of them, even skills beyond the actual career needs the student requires. The idea was that graduates would be able to do it all and well or not graduate. Specialization isn’t taken into account; would-be inkers or colorists would have to pencil at a graduate level to, well, graduate. Understanding how to draw and do storytelling would certainly make these students better inkers and colorists, but potentially denying them a diploma for an uneven skill set is a problem when it won’t diminish their professional status.

Another issue I have is in weakening the program focus for parachute classes. A two-semester Children’s Book Illustration class was shoehorned into the third year. I was dubious about it at the beginning. I made attempts to have the focus shifted to Book Illustration and Production so the skills would be more transferable toward comics work (designing graphic novels, trade dress, understanding type, and etcetera.), but they came to naught. If a secondary set of skills needed to be enhanced to allow some sort of back-up employment, then the options should feed the main focus in some way. Most of the comics people I know have done both storyboards and concept art in addition to comics work, or have left comics to follow those careers. I’ve done children’s book illustration, it’s a very different field from comics with very few points of intersection with the comics skill set.

With some major weaknesses identified, I can address goals again:
Program should be versatile enough to allow skill focus and career specialization
Program should offer some education in related fields with a high degree of shared skills
Students should be employable upon graduation.

That last one is the biggie. Artists are usually like quarterbacks; they get better with experience and after they’ve been whacked to the ground a few times. Ensuring a student is ready to professionally pencil (or ink, or colour) a book after three years of college is a tall order.

With such a specific and modern set of goals, I really don't think that many of the old ways of doing things can be brought to the table. Spending 20+ hours doing an exact and measured study of a plaster cast may develop a valuable set of skills for the imaginative artist, but no broad-based 3-year program can really afford to take that much time on a single exercise without being certain the whole of it develops the student in the best and most efficient manner. The skills developed by doing precision work are valuable, but the resurgent Atelier system is too cumbersome for a modern program.

I believe it can be achieved, and I start to explore how I think it might be done next update.