Sketching in Practice Symposium

Tag: comics

  • Not Your Grandmother’s Morning Funnies: Dr. Jessica Motherwell on bias-fighting comics

    Jessica Motherwell

    According to Dr. Jessica Motherwell, comics can be about a lot more than Monday-hating cats and boys with sling-shots.

    Motherwell, a Justice Institute of BC (JIBC) lecturer and counsellor, recently led a project where students used a comic-book-making app to identify strategies for combatting sexism and homophobia. Even more impressive: they did it all in under ten minutes.

    Come to her SkIP session, co-led by JIBC Instructional Designer Krista Lambert, on how sketching in the virtual space can be used to create a more inclusive world.

     

  • Early SKiP announcement – Dr. Jessica Motherwell McFarlane, Ph.D.

    Early SKiP announcement – Dr. Jessica Motherwell McFarlane, Ph.D.

    Kicking off the final countdown (4 more days!) to contribute to our call for proposals, we are announcing some of the accepted proposals that made our initial call deadline. Drawing on a large pool of local and generous contributors that have agreed to share their innovative drawing practices, as well as reaching out to an international community joining us, its hard to hold back on on the amazing talent we are bringing together on June 24th.  There is still space and time to submit, and we are focusing on being as accessible and inter-disciplinary as possible so check it out!

    Dr. Jessica Motherwell McFarlane, Ph.D.I’m pleased to share the announcement of our first collaborator, Dr. Jessica Motherwell McFarlane, Ph.D.  We met during the Visual practitioners meetup last year and we connected over the need for simple and effective sketching tools for her students to express themselves. On her amazing course blogs (The Diversity Companion) (The Gender Companion) she shares stories of her teaching and provides space online for her students to engage.  For her SKiP proposal she states…

    “As a diversity and social justice instructor, I frequently ask students to write journal entries to reflect on difficult concepts in my course material. When I noticed how popular comics were becoming, I asked myself, “how can I introduce comics-sketches and “selfies” into students’ reflective process?” I could not have guessed how simple, fun and academically successful this innovation would be.”

    Promising to pick up on our keynote speakers comic  focus, it will great to see practices in ‘sequential art’ playing out in the classroom.

    More updates coming soon!

  • Sketching some comics, April 11-15 with Nick Sousanis

    Grids and Gestures activity post from Nick Sousanis.
    Grids and Gestures activity post from Nick Sousanis.

    Since the early days of comic book scholarship (yes I’m talking Scott McCloud here folks) there has been a desire on the part of comic book creators to share the magic of their process, with an emphasis on those who “can’t draw”. Starting today, our upcoming keynote speaker will be continuing this fine tradition, with his week long “collective comics-making activity” called, Grids and Gestures.

    Grids and Gestures is an exercise intended to offer participants insight into a comics maker’s decision-making process for composing the entire page through the hands-on activity of making an abstract comic. It requires no prior drawing experience and serves to help reexamine what it means to draw.

    An interesting tie in here is DS106, one of the one most participatory online learning communities spawned by the internet in recent years, where this activity was cloned into the “Daily Create” assignment bank.  Members of the DS106 community have been taking up the challenge and producing some awesome work.

    For “Sketching in Practice symposium” this serves as a prime example of the hands on activities we will be exploring on June 24th. Our call for proposals is currently OPEN and we will be making some important announcements about it by the end of the week!