This one is from The Funny Times, a national humor publication that has published my stuff since the early 90's. So I love them. They rock.

They tend more toward social/political humor so there are various politicians' bodies and heads you can match up. Very entertaining!

http://www.funnytimes.com/playground/

One of my students showed me a comic he had made with this. It's pretty fun!

I think one of the benefits of using it is that it makes you think about all the various things that make up a comic - characters, speech, backgrounds, etc. -- and also asks you to decide how many frames you want to use. These can be kind of stumbling blocks for a kid just trying out cartooning, so this is a nice way to experiment.

I also like the way the backgrounds introduce a horizon line so you can experiment with making things look closer and farther away.

http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/comic/

I'm reading a really interesting book right now called "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America."

I haven't finished it, but I'm at the part where kids in schools are burning piles of comic books.

It's all about how comic books got accused of fomenting all sorts of misdeeds in the nation's youth in the middle of the last century. And while reading this, something occurred to me: media is like food.

I love media. I love movies, and TV shows, and books, and radio, and DVDs, and the Internet. And I would argue that just about everybody likes food.

Problem is, there's food that's good for you and there's food that's bad for you. We expend enormous amounts of energy teaching our kids how to eat. What to eat, how much, what not to eat, Sesame Street songs about "any time foods" vs. "sometime foods,"... etc. Sometimes this gets to the point of encouraging the opposite of what we want in eating behavior when we try too hard or treat food like a reward.

Well, media is the same way. There are things that are appropriate for different ages. There are things that one kid likes and that terrify another kid. But most of all, we have to learn how to be consumers of media the same way we learn to consume food. Not all of it is good, and you need some basic judgment to know what you are dealing with.

To help with this, I recommend this website: Commonsense Media. It's a place where you can get reviews of new movies, find out what's going on with pop culture, and just be a savvy consumer so you can teach your kids to do the same.

It's just plain dumb to think burning piles of comic books, or records, or whatever is going to solve anything. The minute you tell one person what can or cannot be said, that's a crack in our free society. But you can be smart about media "nutrition" and help kids have a healthy relationship with it all.

This picture shows a bunch of paintings of the same subject: a rose. What's cool here is that each painting is made using some different kind of "brush." The artist (who is 6) first made the one in the lower row, second from right, using a brush. She wasn't happy with that one for some reason, so I asked her, "What don't you like about it?" She said she didn't like the shape of the flower. So I suggested, "Why don't you try painting it again using something different?" This touched off a process that resulted in a pile of paintings, each one interesting and fun in its own way. She painted with a rubber band, a Lego, a leaf, a rose petal, her finger, a piece of cloth, a crumpled up piece of paper... and that really abstract one was made with one of those pens that wraps around into a bracelet.
Sometimes painting or drawing with something other than a brush or pencil can take the artist one step away from being too critical of the outcome. Working with weird stuff is fun in and of itself, and it frees the artist up and quiets criticism.
I also love the way the basic rose shape gets repeated over and over. And she reinterpreted it a bit with each new "brush."
The key things here I think are keeping the subject simple, and allowing strange things to be used as a brush. Oh, and using washable paint.

This site is just full of projects that you can print out and make. Her artwork is fabulous, but what's also cool is that the projects are formatted so that you can print them out and add your own touches. I like the little tiny books, for example. Enjoy!

I think restaurants are on to something. Now, being a person with kids means I eat at a lot of restaurants that hand out crayons when you sit down. Sometimes they also give you a puzzle, or a maze, and sometimes the kids' menu is in there somewhere. But the expectation is, there's gonna be drawing during dinner.

Even when we go to the nice restaurants, if they've got paper placemats, those are going to be drawn on. I'll pull out pencils and let the kids go for it.

Well, we've adopted this habit at home, too. We keep a cup of pencils or a package of pens on the table pretty much all the time. I used to think it was because I was really bad at getting the table cleared before dinner - now I realize that I'm doing that on purpose.

Having paper and pencils available is soothing. It accommodates the desire to just sit and make marks. I know many people like there to be a certain decorum at the table, and we do expect people to say "please" and sit on their chairs in between squirming.

But I find this blending of drawing and eating to be really interesting on a lot of levels. I hear from parents of older kids that it's easier to have a conversation with their child when he or she slightly distracted - maybe the TV is on, or you're driving somewhere - anything that is not a full-frontal conversation assault.

Sometimes thoughts flow more smoothly with my younger kids, too, when they have a pencil in their hand. We can talk about their day, or ask questions, and it's a little less stressful. I haven't done clinical studies here, I'm just offering an observation.

Maybe that's why all those old master painters did so many pictures of food.

This is kind of painful to watch but it's spot-on. Take a look at the video.
Then, look at the facts page too. Read the whole thing, it's all really good.
And let me say, this is a good time to acknowledge - again - the efforts of great public school teachers to take what they've got to work with and make something of it - year after year.
Send this to everyone you know.
This is why I am teaching.
And as an independent teacher, I work in lots of different settings - and see the synapses fire off in all kinds of kids. Not just the stereotypical "artsy" ones, but all of them. Different ages, different abilities, different personalities.
The best education teaches kids how to learn. THAT is what you take with you.

This book has been around for a very long time. It's a great book for showing how drawing involves a simple set of skills and it lets you try and practice each one individually. You can get this at Amazon too, and it also has a workbook if you're into putting all your stuff in a fancy workbook. But paper works fine too.

Alrighty then, we're on to Part 3 of the Diagram. As a refresher, it looks like this:




Part 3 is terribly, terribly important because it is all about experiments and surprises. These days it seems all we want is the RIGHT answer. We want to be RIGHT all the time. Kids in school are supposed to learn to do things right so they can pass tests. Problem is, often there is more than one way to be right, or the right answer doesn't become clear immediately.

I worry that this has become too all-or-nothing. Galileo didn't do everything perfectly the first time. A lot of Leonardo's inventions were kind of weird. The lightbulb, the computer, recorded sound - nothing came without lots of experiments. In fact, here's an article about the earliest known experiment in recording sound that just got discovered. It is really cool.

I've watched a lot of kids have a really love/hate relationship with the eraser end of their pencil. In fact, when the eraser gets involved, most of the time that kid is not too happy. In fact, I've worked with a class for an hour or more only to find that one or two kids still have blank sheets because they've drawn - and then erased - any number of drawings.

Here are a couple reasons why:
1. The eraser sometimes means failure. You didn't draw it right, so you have to erase. Only people who mess up HAVE to erase.
2. The eraser is being used to obliterate a "bad" drawing. You must wipe the whole thing off the paper so it never happened.

Thinking on your feet means being willing to experiment and to be surprised. An eraser can be used to make smudges, or to draw in reverse on a white board. They can also be stuffed into pencil sharpeners, but that's a different story.

So, I try to get kids to think before they erase. Can you set the drawing aside and come back to it? What's the real reason for erasing? At least by asking you can find out more about how you feel about what you're drawing -- good or bad.

So much great stuff to look at!

Okay, getting back to the diagram (if you need a refresher, I introduce it here.)

Part 1 was, How to Ask Good Questions.

Now, here's Part 2: How to Discover Answers.

I had a good chance to consider this on my recent trip to the coast, because we were totally throwing rocks and running around in sand and checking out stinky tide pools. We were ACTIVELY engaged in our surroundings.

Things with screens (TVs, DVDs, games, phones, etc.) are primarily PASSIVE. Look, I used to work in the game industry, so I've played lots and lots of video games. And video games, even with role-playing and all of it, are passive things. No matter what you do, you are reacting to the design of the game. You have to figure out how to get around, how to accomplish things, and all of that.

There is hope - Wii games, for example. And Second Life. But you're still... consuming what someone else has set up. Someone else imagined it first.

To really Discover Answers, you need to be in the driver's seat. You need all your different types of senses and brain cells. When you draw, it's you, and your pencil. When you look at something, you have to decide how you're going to look at it. Is it something you can pick up and move around? Do you need to move yourself around to get a better look? Or is it inside your head? Can you move it around in there to get a better look at it?

When you go to start drawing, you have to decide what materials you are going to use. Do you need mooshy pastels, or sharp crayons, or a big felt-tip pen? Or are you just using whatever is handy at the moment?

Discovering Answers means being willing to be surprised, and being ready to see a whole lot of different ideas. Often the best answers come from somewhere that is unexpected. After all, isn't that what research is all about? If you already knew everything, you would never have to look anything up.

These days it is really easy to mistake data for information. Data is stuff you can display on a screen or look up in a database. Data is what you get when you search on Google or Wikipedia. It can be really helpful, but it is only part of the story.

When you are going to draw something, what you need is information. You need to know all about something, like how it makes you feel or what it's like at different times of day. Drawing is expressing your feelings and your imagination. You can't get that off a screen, it has to come from your experience.

So, Discovering Answers means you have to be ready and willing to pay attention to your world and to experience it as the messy, surprising place that it is -- not something neatly designed for a screen.

Not much signal here!

As I mention in my previous post, asking good questions means changing your perspective, and seeing something in a fresh way to get your imagination moving.


For example, cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and museum educator Philip Yenawine developed something called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). This is a very simple way of looking at art and asking questions about what you see. It reveals a lot about how different people can look at the same thing and have different reactions. You can learn more about it here.


While VTS is aimed mainly at art in museums, I'd like to take it a step further and use it to look at advertisements. We are so covered in media and messages and SELLING these days it's hard to know where one ad starts and another one stops. And to me, teaching about art also means teaching about how to look at all the stuff that comes into our field of view with smart, savvy eyeballs.


So, here's something to try. Grab a magazine, and turn to an advertisement.


Now, answer these questions:

1. What is going on in this ad?

2. What do you see that makes you say that?

3. What else do you see?

4. Go back to #1 and repeat. Keep at it until you feel like you've given the ad the once-over.


Now that you've taken a really good look at the ad, you can try these questions from Common Sense Media:

1. Who made this ad?

2. Who did they make it for?

3. How does it get your attention (sizes of things, colors, pictures etc.)?

4. What is the message of the ad?

5. How does it communicate the message (pictures, words, celebrities, etc.)?


Asking good questions can turn you from a passive consumer to a smart, savvy, creative thinker and problem solver.

A couple of pointers:
- There are no right answers to the questions above - it's all about revealing what people see.
- Little kids will come up with really random answers to these sometimes! This can be great fun - and very enlightening as to how our ad-saturated world really looks to them.
- If you have more than one person looking, be sure to notice that everyone has their own answers and that's okay too.

I said I would offer some background on my 4-step diagram that helps me design activities and art lessons. The steps are:
1. How to ask good questions
2. How to discover answers
3. How to think on your feet
4. How to communicate to others

Let's start with the first one: How to ask good questions.

Every great discovery starts with good questions, new questions, risky questions that haven't been asked before. To really see something, you have to be willing to ask questions that you are not used to.

Try this exercise in looking without drawing:
- Find a really boring object. Maybe a chair, or a box, or a pencil. Anything will do.
- Put it in front of you.
- Now, look at its shape. Let your eyes follow its outline. Stare at it long enough that it stops being a chair, or a phone, or a piece of paper and starts just being a blob in front of you.
- As your eyes follow the outline, you'll notice something. That outline has nothing to do with the shape of the object that you might have in your head. For example: a chair might make you think of a square with legs under it. But when you outline a chair with your eyes, all you'll see is a place where it goes up, then maybe to the right, then maybe at an angle, then back to the left... not very chair-like at all.

What just happened? You opened up a whole world of questions about an ordinary object. Questions that weren't there before. Like, what is it really shaped like? How does its outline go? What shapes make up this object? How does it relate to the space around it?

This what I mean by asking good questions. To ask good questions, you have to change your perspective. When you see something in a new way, it becomes a new thing. In the case of visual arts, you get past the symbols you may have in your head ("chair," "pencil," "paper,") and really start to break an object down into just its shape.

If you're feeling ambitious, you can take a piece of paper and a pencil and start outlining that shape on your paper. You'll be amazed at how accurate your outline can be, when you are not trying to draw the "symbol" of a chair and you are just following exactly what's in front of you. But you don't have to draw the shape to change your perspective.