Evelyn Müürsepp, artist and workshop leader, gives great tips on how to make a successful comic workshop. It seems that her group of 5 year old in Estonia are natural comic artists. I'm sure their friends in Berlin will enjoy reading their stories!
Evelyn said,
It was a really good experience and I loved seeing how intuitively kids grabbed the idea and started producing their own stories :-)
I did now know where to start- as I have always struggled myself with visual storytelling- somehow I end up complicating things to fast. This time I just prepared few things and then kids got it from the air.
Things like:
- got couple of 3-4 image comic strip examples from internet (with and without text)
Then asked kids to tell what do they see. Everyone told it their way and then i told the version what was written on "bubbles"- It gave them example that there are many ways to interpret visual story...
- got some comic books for viewing (Just when waiting for start and afterwards when some got their work done earlier they were looking these)
- printed out some ready made comic "boxes"- just in case
- prepared some themes and draw them some examples, themes like: "my expressions", "things I like to do", "my favourite foods", "my dear ones..." Themes seemed to be good just to have (mostly for teachers who were helping to give instructions for youngest ones). 5 year olds started immediately making their own, pretty complicated 3-6 image stories. It was interesting to see how kids who do not read yet follow the story line. It is not from left to right, but seemed to be that starting image was in center and then story was kind of evolving around that image- it never followed the same path, but went one way in the beginning and for next round just image sequence switched and story could go on like that forever- ie story wasn't linear, it was spiraling :-)
I do not know about others, but for me it was great lesson and I really enjoyed it, so seemed the children and teachers (they were actually also surprised how well kids got the idea and how creatively they interpreted it)
