Mumbai, Middle-schoolers and Comics

For a week in early March a handful of experts across the arts and sciences descend upon the American School of Bombay campus to share their knowledge of robotics, coding, mural painting, comics, and etcetera with a bunch of extremely excited 6th-8th graders. 

The program, called Studio 6, is in partnership with the awesome NuVu Studio based in Cambridge. For 3 years now I've travelled over to India to coach the comics-making studio, and as always when traveling, I try to document as much as I can via my sketchbook:

For the studio this year I used some ideas from Lynda Barry's Syllabus and Ivan Brunetti's Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice , two books that have profoundly inspired my ideas for teaching comics and creativity. As always, from self portraits to jam comics, the work that the students came up with just slayed me. 

The idea behind the studio is to make digital webcomics, so I had to teach both the ideas of comics storytelling and how to use Photoshop with a Wacom tablet. The kids take to the digital stuff like fish to water, but it's a heck of a lot to cover in what boils down to three and a half days of work time. That said, I'm super proud of the stuff these guys banged out. Hey are some select pages from the 5 groups in the class.