I got this shirt in Wisconsin at the Writing the Unthinkable workshop with Lynda Barry. I love it!

For two months, I have been dreaming about attending Writing the Unthinkable with Lynda Barry. I wanted to attend the October edition, but I couldn’t make it work, so as soon as the November one was scheduled and announced, I signed up right away.

Announcing our final #writingtheunthinkable with #LyndaBarry workshop for 2019! #EvansvilleWI SAT, NOV 23rd one-day class 10:30am – 5pm Tuition $170.00 💸To enroll, use class password HAND TURKEY in yr subject line & email writingtheunthinkable@tds.net Only 50 seats – act fast! pic.twitter.com/VmftFA0i6n

— Writing the Unthinkable with Lynda Barry (@WTUwLYNDABARRY) September 19, 2019

Well, November 23rd finally arrived last Saturday so I drove out to Wisconsin with my dog Daisy, and I attended that workshop. Below are the first drawings I made:

This is me in a spacesuit taking Daisy along too.

This is me turning into an elephant.

This is me turning into an onion.

And this is me walking Daisy in a Batman suit.

Stay tuned. There are more stories and drawings coming soon!

This is just an experiment using After Effects to animate a childhood memory. Sleeping on a cot in the south room of my grandmother’s house, watching the Twilight Zone on a Saturday night while my grandparents & parents played cards. It was a special time because I was the oldest, I got my own room and got to stay up late watching television.

This week, the people over at Weird Christmas have been getting off track by posting weird Thanksgiving greeting cards. I decided to draw one of an anthropomorphized turkey.

Recently, I’ve been collecting self-portraits made on index cards. I’ve traveled to several different high school career fairs over the last few weeks, and borrowing this idea from Lynda Barry, I have begun asking the high school students to draw portraits of themselves for me on index cards.

New post: "Some pages from Making Comics on creating attendance cards in my…" https://t.co/KJsVxNuLme

— Lynda Barry (@NearSitedMonkey) November 6, 2019

I ordered myself an ink grinding stone and an Asian/Chinese calligraphy brush as described in Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! book.

Although I ordered them separately and several weeks apart, my stone, brush & ink arrived on the exact same day that Lynda’s new book Making Comics arrived in the mail.

I was eager to get busy with my new brush and ink. Lynda suggested to just experiment with using it, so that’s what I did.

After getting the feel of grinding the ink and laying it down on paper for a while, it wasn’t long before I was experimenting with putting washes on some drawings made for me by students on index cards. Here are some examples that I just love:

I feel like I am still getting the hang of using the Chinese brush & ink, but I love using it and how much it adds to these already fabulous images.

I am always looking for ways to help students minimize the costs in their learning. One gaping gap between what we do in my digital media classes and finding affordable or ideally, free resources to do our digital stuff has been in the area of video editing. I have been looking for a quality free video editing tool for a long time and I finally heard about a good one this week from my friend Mike Wesch on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. It is called DaVinci Resolve, and I can’t wait to download and try it out.

Another resource Dr. Wesch recommended that I hadn’t heard of before is Videvo, which has high-quality, free video footage and sound, as well as premium content that paying members can access.

Finally, I found on Dr. Wesch’s website a treasure trove of video editing resources about how to make high quality videos. These are found on the Anth101 film school page.

I really like this group drawing assignment from Lynda Barry. Each student drew a self-portrait as a member of a jazz band. Then the students copied several of the portraits on to a stage to create a whole band. This is a fantastic idea!

Lately, I have been having my own students do some self-portraits. We did One recently during our “career week” in which we drew portraits of ourselves doing the job or profession we thought we wanted to do as a young child, around 9 years old. It was pretty fun.

We also did the “drawing jam” exercise as Lynda B. discussed in her book Syllabus, (p108-9) in which you fold a piece of paper up so it makes 16 squares. Then you pass the paper around with each student writing the name of a job/occupation or a type of person. So you could have “doctor” or “dancer” or “nerd” or whatever. You only get 10 seconds to write this as a title in one of the squares. You keep passing the paper around until each square is filled. Next, you pass the paper around from person to person, allowing one minute to make a drawing of that person. Each person in the class makes the sixteen square paper and you are working on making one minute drawings on different pages each time until all of the pages have sixteen drawings on them.

In my class, we took another day and colored the drawings in with crayons. They colored and I read a chapter to them out of the book we are reading as an assigned reading. The book is Darius the Great is Not Okay. It has been a long time since a teacher has read a book to them and also a long time since they colored with crayons. But one thing I have noticed with college freshmen is that they enjoy doing things they enjoyed doing in elementary school but have long since forgotten about.

Some other Lynda Barry assignments I like:

Jim – The Devil Cat. (Make a comic about a story you just told or heard)
Three Phrases (What happens when you use different captions on the same drawings?)