Making Comics
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The bestselling, idiosyncratic curriculum from a 2019 MacArthur Fellow will teach you how to draw and write your story
“The self-help book of the year.”—The New York Times
Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don’t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images.
For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged.
Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry's bestselling Syllabus, and this time she shares all her comics-making exercises. In a new hand-drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can’t draw that they can, and, most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn.
Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barry follows up Syllabus by againcondensing her celebrated visual storytelling courses into an instructional book that doubles as a work of art. Through her signature nimble comics and collage, Barry provides guidelines for teachers, students, and aspiring artists. These include pragmatic instructions on art supplies (Barry recommends keeping them cheap and simple, and the book itself is drawn on lined notebook paper), class rules and exercises, and theories about the nature and value of telling stories in pictures. "There was a time when drawing and writing were not separated for you," Barry writes, assuring newbies that "the most lively work comes from people who gave up on drawing a long time ago." Students are told to experiment with drawing with both hands, to "close your eyes and draw a bacon and egg breakfast," and to keep a daily illustrated diary. Gradually, the lessons expand into creating characters, drawing comic strips, and the mechanics of making minicomics. Barry's approach to art instruction is reminiscent of Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and the classes taught by artist Marilyn Frasca, under whom Barry studied; she also builds from Ivan Brunetti's Cartooning: Practice and Philosophy. But these lessons from Barry, like her art, capture her own brand of magic: a synthesis of theory, practice, memory, imagination, and "a certain sort of unlearning."
