While perusing my Twitter feed last week, I ran into an interesting series of little cartooning exercises put out by the Center of Cartoon Studies (@cartoonstudies on twitter.) The program is just a one week cartooning exercise program (or workout) and is availble for free! It is open to anyone who is just starting out as a comic arist or animator to those of us who have been here for awhile. As for me, I’ve been semi-professionally/ professionally making comics for over a decade, so a workout program is never a bad thing to do.

What the Center of Cartoon Studies (CCS for short) does, is every day the center sends out an e-mail explaing what the daily project is. Some daily projects are short (like today’s) and some a bit longer, like tomorrow’s. Make sure that when you check your e-mail, you check your spam or promotions filters! I use Google Mail and their daily e-mail kept getting put into my promotions folder, I had to fish it out of there and put it into my primary. I may have accidently deleted one or two e-mails the first few days before undoing the action. Whoops!

So, Day 1’s assigntment was:

Create a four-panel comic. It can be autobiographical, experimental, a collection of facts about something that interests you, or your day’s to-do list. Cartooning is about finding a sequential rhythm. Think of the four-panel comic as the haiku of cartooning.

Under the description (and a wonderful gif image of comics being drawn) they do give a few tips about how to make a four panel comic. I won’t provide them here (hey, sign up for the workout to find out what the tips are.) 

For my four panel comic, I went with something that was slice-of-life and very inspirational for strip comics- the life of my dogs. Especially Wheatley, who is a little clumsy clown of a pup. This is what I came up with:

It’s a simple comic, most strip comics are better if they are addressing a simple topic. In this comic, I addressed Wheatley’s desire to go outside and play in the snow. Wheatley, I should note, is trained to ring a strip of bells attached to our back door to let me know when he wants out (or food, or water, or snacks, that boy knows it gets my attention.) I’ll also note that I didn’t draw this digitally, this is from a page in my sketch book.

For refernce, here is a picture of Wheatley below:

Tomorrow I’ll post what I did for Day 2!

Keep being awesome,

Kat