Gahan Wilson

Somewhere in my early adolescence I discovered Gahan Wilson. His sense of humor was warped. His drawings dark and a little creepy. It was a perfect fit. For the few moments I dreamed of writing comics, I dreamed of being Gahan Wilson.

Thank you Mr. Wilson for helping me to survive my childhood!

I was reminded of his work when I read recently about a documentary coming out about his life called Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird. He also recently illustrated this short animation based on a story by Neil Gaiman. Nice to know that he is still active.

2009 Folk Musicians Retreat

Wish I was in Maryland making music instead of eating my oatmeal and planning a presentation on Moviemaker for my third hour.

Maybe next year. (click comic for full size picture.)

Gever Tulley: TED Talk as a comic book

Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, gave a talk at TED recently and created a comic book to hand out to the participants. It is available here for download. I highly recommend it. I often feel like we've got away from the idea of letting kids learn by doing. It's too messy. It's too hard to measure. It looks too much like play and not enough like instruction. It can be hard to match to a standard.

I may be wrong. Old fashioned even. I still think it is a valuable way to learn. Not the only way but one way. And one way we shouldn't deprive our children from experiencing.
















I'll link to his new TED talk when it come available. Until then take a peek at his last talk: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do!

Oh....and the idea of using a comic book format to present information. I am so going to use this!

[Update: I was inspired to buy Comic Life to help me create comic style documents after reading Tulley's comic book style notes. Probably write more on this program later, but I posted my first attempt.]
[via Make] [Images captured from TinkeringSchool: by Gever Tully: 2009: Creative Commons-no derivative]

Comic Life

I've been messing around with a new program this weekend: Comic Life. When I first loaded it into my system, I was also listening to the weekly workshop from the guys at Tangier Sound. The first three minutes was a story about Patrick dropping his camera into the marsh mud. I grabbed some screen shots, pretty much used the dialog from the video and ended up with this cartoon.

So far I'm pretty impressed with the program. (If you click on the cartoon, it will load a larger version). My apologies to the Patrick and Dear Old Dad for the "duck poop" comment. They didn't say that. I used to teach middle school. It is the only excuse I have!

Comix Revisited

I wrote about MakeBeliefsComix.com recently and thought I'd share my experience using it in the classroom with a mixed grade level high school class. The assignment was to find one current political quote and one environmental quote to use in the creation of a comic.

I had a few kids who grabbed the first thing they found from their search and plopped it into a comic bubble. Most of my students seemed to get into the assignment and spent some time trying to find just the right quote. I was pleased with the results and grabbed a few to post. (My apologies for the blurry text....can't quite get the result I want using blogger.)

Governor Palin seemed to be a popular person to quote probably because she was in the news so much at the time we did this activity.

























I'll do this activity again next semester. Students were able to finish in one period (roughly 50 minutes) and the hardest part of the assignment for my kids was grabbing a screenshot. I always run across something that I think they will know and this semester, grabbing a screenshot is the one I thought they all would be able to do and very few could. None of my high schoolers had any problems using the tools in MakeBeliefsComix. They were up and running with no guidance from me.

There was some good discussion in class about what comic figures to use for their characters. We talked about how selecting different types of representations could reflect their opinion of that person. Also kids played with the size of the different characters in each frame to denote who was speaking or in some cases who was more important.

[Images all created in MakeBeliefsComix by Mr. Gunn's Multimedia class at Mountain Range High School]

Make Beliefs Comix

I was looking for a simple way to make a comic online and I think I found one. It's called MakeBeliefsComix.com. I had an idea for kids to take a famous quote and and use it as the dialogue for a cartoon. I think this might be a fun way for kids to gather quotes from current news, historical events or famous speeches and think about them in a visual way. How would the person look while they were speaking? What was the emotion conveyed?

It sounds like a simple concept but I am constantly amazed at how kids, even high school aged ones, miss the subtleties of a comment. I see this with my video students as they struggle to convey a feeling or mood via expression or setting.











I wish the program allowed me to add backgrounds and that there were a few more character choices, like a few more ethnic faces, but that's just being nit-picky. I'm going to run this one by my multimedia kids and see what they create.

One note before you get all your students shultzing their way to cartoondom is that they need to enter two email addresses. A link to the finished cartoon will then be sent. Or, you can print it out. Neither of these are great solutions for me, so I will be teaching my kids some basic screen capture skills when we do this activity. Directions for doing this are on the site.

[via Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… Thanks again to Larry for pointing me to some great resources.]
[Image captured from MakeBeliefsComix.com: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com]
[Cartoon created using tools at http://www.makebeliefscomix.com]