Comic artist, Kev F Sutherland made a return visit to Clongowes on Thurs 8thNov to present a workshop to art students in Rudiments and Elements. Using his unique humour Kev guided the students through the art of drawing and storytelling for comics. By the end of the session students had created a class comic using drawings and stories from each individual. Kev also gave each student a comic portrait of themselves.
Liam Lysaght (Rudiments) reports
Last Thursday Kev F, the cartoon artist, visited Clongowes. He agreed to do a learning workshop with the Third line (First and Second year) art classes in the school library. The very first thing he did was to tell us that anyone can draw. He asked for anyone who thought they couldn’t draw to put their hand up. Being an art class, only one person did. That person came up to the board he had brought in. First he asked the student to draw a circle with a dot in it. When asked what it could be, we all thought, an eye, but the one who’d drawn it said a pig’s nose. So Kev Launched into a story he made up on the spot about a flying pig, and a Ryanair flight trailing smoke. The idea of Ryanair cooking food over an open fire onboard to save money got the creative juices flowing in our heads, as we all began to plan in advance what our comics would be.
We learned how to use letters to make a decent looking Bart Simpson, he brought in some of the Benno comics he’d draw, (mainly Dennis the Menace) and then he got us to invent our own characters, after showing us to use perspective, and tricks to make comic strips look better.
Once we’d voted on a name for our class comic book (happy rabbit death arena), we all started drawing our comics on an A4 page, while he drew a brilliant cover. Once we were done, we each added something to the cover, and then had our faces cartoon-afied. He then added all our comics together, photocopied them, and gave us each a first edition copy of Happy rabbit death arena, and cartoon version of us on a page. It was a great day and we really enjoyed it, (it got us out of maths class too!).
By the end of the session students had created a class comic using drawings and stories from each individual. Kev also gave each student a comic portrait of themselves. Thanks to Kev F Sutherland, Ms. O’Loughlin and Mr. Nelson for hosting the event.
This was a cross-curricular initiative between the James Joyce Library and the Art Dept.
