Students learn fundamentals of comic art

November 16, 2008 09:08 pm

— By Joe Hadsall
jhadsall@joplinglobe.com
Two Joplin teenagers couldn’t quite agree on Sunday afternoon. They couldn’t decide whether an illustration of a vampire by Carlee Ballard was “godly” or “beastly.”
“It’s godly-beastly,” said Summer Dean, 12, of Joplin, settling the matter.
Ballard, 16, of Joplin, smiled as she kept working on “Dante,” an anime-styled vampire she drew Sunday in a comic-art class at Spiva Center for the Arts.
Instructor Sean Fitzgibbon said the aim of the class was to teach students fundamentals of drawing so they could create their own stories.
“This is a narrative art class,” said Fitzgibbon, who is an art instructor for the University of Arkansas. “We’re showing drawing fundamentals and storytelling techniques, so they can take their own direction.”
The goal of the two-day course was for students to draw a cover and a page of story. Ten students of varying ages took the class.
Ballard, who said she has been drawing since she was a kid, picked up a lot of information about drawing body parts, she said. She pointed to Dante’s hand, upon which perched a bat.
“Before this class, I had a lot of problems with hands and bodies,” she said. “But (Fitzgibbon) showed us how to proportion things, and it helped a lot. Dante’s hand looks great now.”
Ballard said she also picked up valuable information on how to draw backgrounds. She plans to finish her story, inspired by the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer.
Maddie White, 13, of Joplin, didn’t have a name for the wide-eyed, anime-styled girl she drew. Her art manifested some of her personal wishes.
“Since I go to private school, I drew her with one of my school uniforms,” White said. “I also put red tips in her hair, because I have always wanted red tips.”
The class was made up of more than teenagers interested in anime.
Suzanne Wilson, 71, of Joplin, said she learned important things about drawing human figures.
“I’ve taken a story I wrote and reducing it to a graphic novel,” Wilson said. “I’m discovering that this requires a simplified story line, and I’m creating images that used to be words in fiction.”
Fitzgibbon said there are many styles of comic art, including anime, manga, American superhero and children’s books.
Most of the students agreed that the best thing they learned was how to draw a human shape. White said she learned how to draw “stick figures.”
“We learned how to draw stick figures,” White said. “We learned how to make the joints and the basic shape, then fill it in with everyday shapes like circles and spheres.”

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