Family game time doesn’t always need a board game.

Today’s art exercise was lead by my brother. I think it is an excellent activity for a variety of ages to learn from and enjoy. Select a scribe to take down notes, grab some blank paper and your favorite drawing tools, you are ready to go. The challenge was to loosely write a three panel comic together, then split up and illustrate it separately. How would our different styles look on paper?

There are lots of great skills to learn here and it can even be a good party game if that’s how you roll. For starters you practice collaborative creative writing by thinking up a common story. Just say whatever comes to your mind. Make a list or whatever is easiest for you to refer back to as you draw. You can refine this part of the project as little or as much as you like. Try not to over think it though.

This is a nice freestyle project to use as a warm up for a bigger art project too. Get into the game, focus, relax, have fun.

For our comic we came up some random characters to put in our silly story; a dinosaur, a chicken, a shark, and Batman. Then it was decided that there would be a volcano. Everyone else in the group tonight chose to also somehow incorporate the dinosaur chewing bubble gum, they were on a tour, and Batman had to end up in the shark’s mouth somehow. I chose to skip those last elements but still tie in sweets, only differently.

Set a time limit and go have fun! During the unveiling we talked about ways to polish our work if given more time. I also highly recommend telling each person what you like best from their comic too. One thing that immediately came to our attention was that we like to draw on different scales. My daughter got around the size limitations of the paper by using a separate piece of paper for each panel in her comic. One of my boys chose not to draw panels. That’s okay. In this case, to quote a fun movie, rules really are ”more like guidelines”. 

Keep scrolling to see all of our masterpieces!

Up above all the characters were playing hide and seek. Next to an active volcano. A volcano that is lobbing fireballs. Batman is tiny and hiding in the shark’s mouth. The green smudge is the dinosaur not realizing his bubblegum is visible and giving away his hiding spot. I think the chicken is hiding behind the volcano.

The picture below has a lot of different stories happening at once. Most notably something has gone very wrong while trying to throw a shark in the volcano and a dinosaur has a sweet tooth. I also love that the dinosaur is an ankylosaurus.

There is the 3 separate paper approach. (Sorry for the lighting differences in the frames. That’s on me.) This artist also chose to use known cartoon characters from different sources and bring them all together. Given more time this comic would have been even better but we had to cut her off or she would have been drawing all night.

Above, I decided that making s’mores sound like an emergency sounded funny. I wasn’t going to ink it but I had a little extra time so I went with it.

Below, I love my brother’s sketchy little comics! All I will specifically say for now though is check out the dinosaur’s face in the last panel.

There you have it. Now you give it a try. 
Be creative and keep shining!