Making a Comic Book or Manga!

*This class has been updated and modified thanks to the feedback from the learners who previously took this course. This was originally a 4 day Comic Book Camp that has expanded into a full course to help learners improve their art skills while they work on developing their ideas for a comic book.*

This 20 day course is designed to teach learners the skills they need to create a successful comic book, manga, or web comic. This course will cover many topics an artist needs to know in order to create a compelling comic book. Such skills include storyboarding, creating thumbnails, inking, coloring, writing dialogue, world building and more.

Class Structure:

Students will be greeted as they enter the classroom and will have time to share art they have created. Then the instructor will begin instruction by focusing on the current week's topic. This should last about half of the class depending on how quickly the learners are grasping the content. The other half of class will be used to practice the new skills or to further develop individual comic book ideas. This will be the primary structure for the 20 day course.

What to Expect:

Each class learners will learn new skills and focus on implementing these skills to the comic book, manga, or webcomic they plan on creating. The instructor will periodically check on the progress of the learners and provide feedback. The learners in the class are encouraged to provide critiques to help improve storytelling aspects, provide suggestions for improvement, and provide positive feedback. Negative feedback will not be tolerated.

Learners can create their comic books traditionally or digitally. The instructor will be creating a comic book along side the learners. The instructor's screen will be shared during instruction so the students can easily follow along with any step-by-step drawing process, as well as to see plenty of examples from real comic and manga pages that meet the current day's topic.

The class is intended to provide the learner with the skills they need to create their own individual comic book, not necessarily to complete a comic book at the end of the 20 day course. 

Course Topics and Outline:

Day 1- Generating Ideas For Characters
Day 2- Character Design Challenge
Day 3- Drawing Human Anatomy Pt 1-Upper Body
Day 4- Drawing Human Anatomy Pt 2-Lower Body
Day 5- Drawing Animal Characters
Day 6- Designing Clothing For Characters
Day 7-  Gesture Drawing
Day 8- Posing Your Characters
Day 9- Character Turnarounds
Day 10- World Building: One Point Perspective
Day 11- World Building: Two Point Perspective
Day 12- Roadmapping Your Story
Day 13- Storyboarding
Day 14- Paneling-Panel Shots and Tiers
Day 15- Page and Panel Composition
Day 16- Thumbnail Sketches
Day 17- Speech Bubbles, Thought Bubbles, and Narration
Day 18- Inking our Sketches-Blocking and Hatching
Day 19- Coloring and Color Theory
Day 20- Finishing Touches!

I look forward to meeting you and helping you to develop your comic book ideas!