Above: House on Fire homework completed. Photo by Bucca 4 of Hearts

Hello my dear ‘What It Is’ class

Here’s the homework and our ‘week in review”

Best to you from

Professor Lynda

For Tuesday-

1. Finish Cock-Eyed, by Ryan Knighton

2. Ivan Brunetti Exercise:

Draw three 16 panel pages on 8.5 x 11 paper. We already almost finished the first page in class, so just 2.25 more pages to go. You can do it!

Just as we did in class last night, you’ll be folding a piece of paper so there are 16 ‘panels’— and then drawing something or someone four times - one drawing per panel—in non-photo blue pencil—- until you fill up all of the 16 panels on each page. Spend between 30 seconds and a minute on each non-photo blue sketch.  Ink in the picture with your flair pen. 

We started this assignment in class, drawing a nun, an astronaut and a student. You can draw what ever you like as long as you draw it four times, from people to cartoon characters to objects like a telephone or a toilet or a pterodactyl. 

3. Continue daily writing exercises:

 Daily 4 minute diary entries

One 7-8 minute writing exercise per day beginning with the words “You are”—writing in the second person, present tense.

REMINDER: Skip a line as you go so your page is ‘double spaced’— this is *very* important as is writing a little bit bigger and a little bit slower.

Week in Review:

7^th class, Tuesday, February 14^th, 2012

Ivan Brunetti and Christ Ware joined us for the entire class on Tuesday. We put up some of the fast drawings we did during the last hour of class the Thursday before, using an exercise from Ivan Brunetti’s “Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice” We drew a car, Cinderella, Batman, two Kung Fu dudes fighting, a mom yelling at her kid and a house on fire. The last drawing we did was in our comp book and your homework was to color in the house fire drawing before Tuesday’s class. We started class by reciting Emily Dickinson’s poem number 1116 together, and then looking at the house fire drawings we made.

Ivan Brunetti had us do a great exercise that blew our minds and made us all laugh very hard but I’m not going to write down what that exercise was because it was the element of surprise that made it work so well and writing it down might wreck it for the people of the future. However, if you missed class that day, please see me at the break on Tuesday and I’ll tell you all about it.

Then Ivan gave an intro-to-comics slide show, including work spanning nearly a century. He showed not only finished comics, but comics in various stages, from rough initial sketches to finished work and talked about how the eye moves around a page, and the language of comics, and what is making us laugh even when we don’t want to laugh. Chris Ware talked about ‘hearing’ comics— and reading them — a different sort of reading that doesn’t involve words and is specific to comics.

Chris Ware brought a portfolio of his original work, sketchbooks, notes and a mind-bending diary with writing so tiny it looked like it had been written with a mouse whisker.

A ‘secret admirer’ hand made kick-ass valentines for the entire class, and Professor Lynda handed out skimpy dollar store Jonas Brothers Valentines: “Wow! Have an EPIC day, Valentine!”  there was the usual candy pile to go to in times of need.

Students turned in their composition notebooks to be reviewed by Professor Lynda before Thursday’s class.

It was an extraordinary evening, the dream class of all classes.

8th class Thursday, February 16, 2012

Composition notebooks were returned and most of the class got silver stars for writing 12 stories in the first 4 weeks of class. Some wrote as many as 16.  Some received new composition notebooks because theirs were very nearly full and new Flair pens because theirs were worn out. Well done!

We talked about Ivan Brunetti and Chris Ware’s visit and then talked about how we would draw a character if we were drawing in Ivan Brunetti’s style. On four index cards students had about 45 seconds to draw four people in Brunetti’s style: A generic girl, a robber, Professor Lynda, and a self portrait.

Then students folded a piece of 8.5 x 11 paper so that there were 16 panels on the page and using a non-photo blue pencil, drew a single character four times, using one of the panels for each drawing. The characters we started with were a nun, an astronaut and a student, spending about 45 seconds on each panel. Then we inked them in using a flair pen.

We put our index card drawings up on the wall and looked them over together, and talked about what was similar about them, and what made us able to tell which drawings were which.

Then we did a writing exercise where we broke down a walk that we took in our lives into different points of the walk — like how a walk from our house to school might include the back door, the back porch, the alley, the tipped over garbage cans, neighbors broken garage door, the insane dog jumping at you from behind a tall fence, the bullies waiting for you near the horse-chestnut trees—— and then we took 8 minutes to write out the walk, beginning with the words “You are…” telling the story of the walk in second person present tense. People read their pieces aloud. Professor Lynda was very happy with this class.

By the end of class, the usual candy pile was reduced to just the weird gnarly candy and ancient Starbursts and Pixie Stix. The question on everyone’s mind is this: will the ancient Starburst candy make it all the way to May?