This week I’ve discovered a cartoonist who has his own rather popular webcomic called ‘Blank-It’. One of the interesting things that Lemmo (the artist) does is to broadcast himself creating the panels of the cartoon using his Ustream TV channel.
In this broadcast Lemmo discusses his design decisions and techniques. He also answers questions from the audience and gives advice. It is so cool to be able to interact with an artist who is in the process of producing an artwork. This has to have implications to those who teach art in schools.
During this stream I asked Lemmo several ‘newbie’ questions and he gave great advice.
Firstly I asked about the software he was using to broadcast his screen and his webcam = Webcam max
Next I asked about the production of shadows in comics as I’d been using the dodge tool in Photoshop and was not particularly happy with the results. Lemmo suggested creating a new layer and then with the pencil tool set on black with the layer opacity set to 15%. This allows you can make shadows with a much harder edge. Then if when printed out the shadows are not to your liking you can head back into the Photoshop file and adjust the opacity on the whole layer which will improve all the shadows. Great advice on so many levels!
In this screen dump you can actually see Lemmo taking a little time off his work to offer me a bit of advice on mine. This was greatly appreciated and I then implemented the advice in my next cartoon. Have a look at the shadows in Byte Club.
So what is my point?
There are many people out there using the interactive web in all different fields. How are you going to use these tools to improve and extend your learning? How are you going to make your students aware of these tools in order that they extend their own learning beyond the constrictions of a narrow curriculum?
Adrian
I find that my students really like their work to look good. So when they have completed a post on their blogs, I encourage them to add an image or graphic or cartoon. Those students who are not strong with their writing skills can get their message across producing a cartoon and I also like to encourage multi-literacies with this media. So, often I ask them just to design a cartoon on a blog prompt or topic. Kevin who conducts a ‘week or day in a sentece” asked us to use a cartoon to describe our day in a sentence which was not only fun, but made us think about visualising our experiences.
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