Cartoon Art

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Cartoon Art
By Tanya

This is a project that I did with fourth graders, but I am sure fifth graders would love it just as much. Basically what the students do is recreate a scene from a comic strip. First, you need to cut out scenes from a comic
strip. Make sure you choose colour ones from the newspaper. You want to choose scenes that don't have a lot of action in them. Peanuts are really good, so is Lucy. Once every student has a cartoon then they get a big piece of drawing paper(11x17). What they do is fold the piece of big paper so that it has 16 squares. You need to instruct the kids on how to fold it because they

will get lost. Have them fold their paper in half one way and then in half again that same way. This will make four columns on the paper. Then they unfold it and fold it in half the other way and in half again. This will leave you with 16 squares. Now they have to divide the cartoon the same way. This is why it is good to choose bigger cartoons if you can. Have the students draw the dividing lines in on both their papers. Use light pencil line on the drawing paper so they will not be seen when they colour the picture. Then the students will transfer square to square from the cartoon to the drawing paper and then colour the picture as close as possible to the original. When they are drawing the squares you might want to talk to them about drawing to scale. It is even a good idea to show them an example on the board of a good example and a bad example. Talk to them about how big they should draw on their big sheet compared to the little cartoon. This is not a one period project. You could span it over three periods or more if needed. Kids just love it and then you display the little cartoon in the corner of the big drawing. It is great for kids who feel that they aren't good at drawing and make sure the students colour their pictures very densely to have the best effect. I use that as one of my marking criteria (dense colour). Oh yah and pencil crayons look the best. Good luck hopefull this wasn't too confusing. Email me if you have any questions. Tanya