c’mon, everyone, Scottie can draw that toon! Cheer him on, and join him-draw one of your own! 🧑‍🎨

Make Your Own Comics

Exercises for the Classroom

Grant Snider

1. Start with a character

Will your character be an avatar of yourself? A plucky young heroine? A grizzled space pirate? A robot with feelings? Design your character with simple shapes that can easily be repeated from panel to panel. Put them in different poses, draw them far away and up close, from various views. Once the character starts moving on their own, you have the start of a story.

2. Journey from panel to panel

Draw the action from left to right, top to bottom across the page. The space between panels is called the gutter. In the gutter, time passes. This amount of time can be a millisecond (a character blinks) or an eon (a star collapses). Use small changes in expression and pose to show what the character is thinking and feeling. Add thought balloons and text bubbles for dialogue.

3. Create new characters

Make each character distinct in shape and personality. Let their form dictate their behavior and action. How do they complement or oppose the main character? What new direction can they take the story?

4. How does it end?

(Snip-this is a pretty long post with the art, so I’m snipping here. I wanted to leave the art big enough to be seen fairly clearly. We will know how our own toons end! Also, though I don’t recall thinking about it when I found this substack, no doubt there was subconscious inspiration from Michael Seidel’s blog. I read it over lunch.)