Lesson 4

In today's lesson we talked a lot about Comic Strips. As these are very famous in Belgium and we even got the chance to visit the Comic Strip Museum while on a visit to Brussels I have found a growing interest for these since I have came to Belgium. We learned about Nello and Patrasche this is a very famous Novel which was written by a British writer but became very famous in Belgium to start of with and now it is a worldwide novel which is very popular in Japan. It has even been made into a film a few times and into Anime. When we visited Antwerp we were able to see the plaque placed in front of Antwerp Cathedral.

An artists image of Nello and Patrasche

Although when i was younger i would never have found myself a big fan of Comic Books, I was always familiar with them because of my brother. The Character called Denis The Menace from the Beano Comic Book was always a popular one in Ireland and one which I can see links with the Belgium Comics which i have been given the change to see in Art Class.

                       

After we learned a little bit about the background of Comic Books we moved on to do a practical activity. I really enjoyed the activity as it allowed me to do a task that I have never did before.. but I will definitely do it with a class some time. We got to pick a figurine and then we got into group and began to make our own comic strips on a large piece of paper using newspapers and crayons which were set our for us. We had the freedom to choose what we wanted which was great. Then we moved around the classroom in our groups to add our own ideas to everyone's Comic Strips. So by the time we got back round to our original table we had a totally new comic strip set our for us. 

Some of the materials we used for the lesson

Our Group Comic Strip and My Individual Comic Strip

We then picked some characters and some ideas of what happened in the big comic strip to make our own individual ones. This was a really good exercise I feel because the children if they carry out the first exercise will have a good idea of the characters in their comic strip and then they just have to use these to imagine their own comic strip. 

My Individual Comic Strip