New Online Course Enrolling Now!

Short Form Comics is a course I've taught to undergraduates for several years. I'm offering it to the public, online, beginning June 7.

We'll produce rough drafts of comic stories from a variety of departure points, generating a backlog of material for students to complete at their leisure. Weekly assignments concentrate on different kinds of comics and aspects of the medium. One week we'll spin joke strips out of literary classics, another we'll make silent, cinematic metaphors. Another assignment will involve hyperbole and explosive layouts, comics as genre.  And there'll be space for non-fiction, memoir, ranting, and a hefty dose of formal experimentation.

This is a good course for artists who want to be better at writing and for writers who want insight into visual storytelling. There'll be a strong element of blockbusting-- overcoming the blank page and discovering stories lurking at the back of your mind that you didn't necessarily know you wanted to tell.

Short Form Comics runs on Tuesday evenings. My other online courses this semester, Cartooning Basics, Figure Drawing for Cartoonists, and Thinking in Ink, also start the second week of June. Sign up soon!

I'm also teaching Figure Drawing for Cartoonists on Wednesdays, live in Manhattan beginning June 8, and Cartooning Basics live Thursdays beginning June 9.

Let's make comics!

Figure Drawing for Cartoonists Student Work

Skeletons at the park by Lindsay Ducey

We had a dynamic group in Figure Drawing for Cartoonists last semester. I managed to document a couple of the amazing pieces by a couple of the amazing people, Lindsay Ducey and G. H, Yamauchi.

G. H. Yamauchi opted to work on skeletons of children.

In this class, we practice our figure drawing by tackling an array of challenges. We begin by looking at the human skeleton, along with the work of Posada and Holbein, in order to practice joint breaks, twist, silhouetting, and other figure staging concerns. Getting skeletons to look alive sets us up for more vivid finished art.

Then we work through topics like forces, foreshortening, muscle groups, and style, working from models, photos, reference, and imagination, leading up to the fun activity where we apply figures to the comic format, composing comic pages improvised from a costumed model.

Yamauchi bravely knocked out her comic in ink.

That one's so fun, I can never resist playing too:

...aaaaand, we proceed from there to plan a comic scene and complete a page or two. The class is informative, challenging and fun. The new semester begins January 28. Sign up soon, tell your friends, and like that. Thanks!

Amazing Art Models

One of the perks of living in NYC is the high quality of art models around town, and one of the perks of teaching is that the best of them model for SVA. Planning this post, I discovered that I have so many great examples to show, I think I'll make this the first of a series.

Cacia Zoo is, deservedly, a social media rockstar. I was honored to have her pose for my Figure Drawing for Cartoonists class last spring. The feeling was apparently mutual. She thanked me on her Instagram, "Your ink drawing is amaaazing! Hope to model for you again some time."

Below are my drawings of Cacia from Drink and Draw NYC a few years ago. More of my Cacia drawings can be found here.

Greer Samuels brings an intense theatricality to his poses. When he saw these drawings I made in my Figure Drawing class this summer, he felt vindicated for his hard work. Life drawing is a truly collaborative process.

When model Ume saw my drawings of her at Drink and Draw NYC not long ago, she invited me to take part in her upcoming exhibition, 30 Bodies, which will be a pop-up show opening Thursday Sept 19 at 7pm and on view through Friday Sept 20 at Con Artist Collective, 329 Broome St. Work by 30 artists will be auctioned and proceeds donated to a charity that brings artists to Puerto Rico.

Below are some of my Ume drawings from Drink and Draw. I actually played with color for a change. More can be found here.

 

These and many more amazing models appear in my classes Figure Drawing for Cartoonists and Inking Comics. I'll post more examples soon, I hope. Classes are enrolling right now and begin in mid-September. The information session is, well, tonight (Aug 20).

Come draw with us!

Demonstration Drawings

I asked a second grader to name the character for me.

Some of my most expressive work seems to happen when I'm lecturing and demonstrating techniques (as I've shown before).

a demo for kids at PS 372

Lessons I give in my Cartooning Basics course are usually, ahem, tested on children first. If kids can master an art concept, adults probably can too.

Whiteboard sketch done at Parsons Pre-College Academy

A similar lesson at SVA

This was to demonstrate ink wash.

This too.

 As you see below, many of the lectures veer well beyond the basics and into fairly esoteric territory.

a demo on the Lexicon of Comicana

Comic strip structure and cartooning from display letters

#8 in a series of Daredoodle warmup exercises 

Adult classes start next week at SVA. Sign up asap.

I'll also be teaching kids grades 5-8 at Hootenanny Art Annex in July and grades 3-5 at Parsons in August, and I'm available for lessons and such:

of course you would.

The Unica Factor

Well friends, are you looking for an oddball obligatory gift to easily send someone this holiday?

https://society6.com/cartooniologist

If you order something from my shop at Society 6, I can virtually guarantee it will be the only one of its kind in existence. They don't make these things unless somebody orders one, and who would do that? So that's an angle? Right?

So you could get somebody this phone case or this pattern of monsters printed on a shirt or backpack or, I dunno, pillow,...

There's coffee mugs & travel mugs, and stuff like that.

Hell, I could take requests if there's some image from one of my websites you'd like printed on some object they offer. Message me.

https://society6.com/cartooniologist

Place an order on my birthday: Sunday Nov. 25th, or the following Cyber Monday, the 26th, using their code CMSHIP, and get deep discounts: 50% to 30% off, depending on the item, and free shipping on most stuff.

And have a happy holiday!