London October 2017

1st Years in London 

this year as every year we headed off to London (the Big Smoke!)

We had spent a lot of time writing up a full itinerary for the students to make sure they got their moneys worth and it was definitely action packed!

Arriving in the city and booking ourselves into the Royal National Hotel, we quickly headed off to the British Museum. Here we encouraged the students to look at sequential art through the ages and also launched our new brief about students discovering Myths and Legends of the Big City. This could potentially include something from the Egyptian artefacts or any of the other collected in the place. 

After that we met up and headed off on a tour of the comics outlets and heading down to China Town for a meal.

first port of call was Forbidden Planet just off the Shaftsbury Avenue. After a fire alarm disrupted the visit we lost vital time getting to the other places we wanted to visit. 

This included Orbital Comics

And GOSH Comics where we arrived just as they were closing up, so making this the second year on the trot we got turfed out!

The meal in china town was good, then we headed off to The Champion Pub to meet up with ex student Rob Cureton from Orful Comics. Rob has worked on many animation productions and that is what his full time job is and he does comics in the evening and sells them at conventions up and down the UK

Day 2 Cartoon and Comic Museum

Going to the Cartoon and Comic Museum is one of the high lights of the visit to London. This year Steve Marchant, the man now in charge of the Museums lottery collection was a very busy man. But he gave up his time to have a talk to the students about the new comics the museum had brought and potential areas in which the collection was looking to buy.

After this we had a drawing challenge for the students in Covent Garden... Where was the garden?

We then headed up the road to Trafalgar Square and gave the Students a challenge to enter the National Gallery, and find a selection of images.

Day 3 MCM London Expo

                

 

Heading off early to London docklands this was going be a challenge but fun day. Once we got into the event it was murder to find anyone again till we met up at the location 

       

                 

what was good, a couple of our members of staff are also independent artist and they had stands at the event selling their work. Awkwardbex - Becci Such and Talburt Comics is our own Claire Smith. 

It all ended up with a mad dash for the train and a long ride home, which seems to be a reoccurring thing now on these trips!

Drawing for Illustration Out and About

Drawing for Illustration 

Perspective Drawings and Establishing Shots

During the induction week I push forward the message to first year (Level 4) students that the comic artist mantra has to be 'Draw Draw Draw!'
So what can we at university level do differently to get across the ideas we want the students to communicate in their work. A lot of the students know about the basics of a comic and how it is constructed, but they come from an education where the word is more important then the image. But inst it also true that 1 image can speak a thousand words, and communicate more effectively and efficiently to a wider and broader audience in a shorter amount of time?

Anyway, that's not the point of this blog. The point of this blog is to get you to realise how we can improve our drawing techniques by adding a bit of realisation to our briefs and encouraging the students to explore the larger world with their pens and pencils, rather than them hiding behind their mobile phones. 

The project above was to get the students to explore perspective. This used to be a day at the train station. But this year we thought differently and slightly out of the box and encouraged the students to take to the roof in the Flaxman and capture a scene from there. 

What we were after in this brief is to get the students to realise the power of the opening shot to help the reader to locate where the story is happening. Above is a drawing by one of the students Tom Newall taken while on the roof of the Flaxman. 

Above Mike Walters opening page with establishing shot and then the reader is lead into a location to demonstrate where the action is about to take place. 

Drawing at Stoke Railway station 

Drawing outside the Mellor Building at Staffordshire University 

drawing around the University 

Perspective in action 

Jason gets down to understand perspective by starting off low down and looking up

New and Old technologies working together to make art

New and old Art

Last Friday, we tried something we've never done before on Cartoon & Comic Arts. That was introducing the students to a 3D programme called Mudbox by Autodesk. A vast amount of the students on the award have never used Photoshop let alone a 3d package. But undeterred by this we attempted to do it anyway. 

The aim is to get them to do something traditional and then incorporate new technologies to show them how it can help to improve their work.

Obviously some of them to to it like ducks to water - others it was a little harder. 

Portrait Drawing 

The other thing we did was to do portrait drawings, unfortunately I sprained my hand the other evening, which made the whole teaching task very hard. But I think I got the message over. 

More importantly, it was an opportunity for the students to do the Cartoon & Comic Arts Mantra - Draw....Draw.... Draw. 

The Idea is to get the students to build on their core skills that were developed in the first semester. Where we encouraged them to design characters then to build the models out of Plasticine.

From the images below you'll see that some of them aren't that bad an artist. 

This time we are going ask them to try and model their portraits using the 3d Software.

 

 

Now we quickly realised that between the drawing and the 3d modelling there is potentially a lot that can go wrong. But education at this level you don't always get the answer you expect. It is about taking the students out of their comfort zone and pushing them. So in the next few weeks it will be interesting to see what develops. 

 


It's already interesting to note that the students who haven't done any art foundation are the stubborn ones who wont push themselves. And see any