2012 Graphic Storytelling: Writing with Pictures and Drawing with Words

Who: Pat Grant
When: Sunday 2 & Sunday 9 September 2012, 10am – 4pm NEW DATES
Full price:
$320; Member: $225; Conc Member: $190

Sometimes it feels like the ability to sling a decent sentence isn’t quite enough for a writer in the modern world. The literary landscape is now littered with screens, windows and graphic interfaces, and there is more and more demand for those of us that call themselves writers to also become image-makers. Writers who can incorporate visual communication techniques into their storytelling have a trump card in their pocket.

This workshop is an introduction to visual storytelling designed especially for writers from non-visual disciplines. It is appropriate for aspiring graphic novelists, picture book authors, screenwriters, and visual poets – in short, anyone who wants to incorporate images into their storytelling. It will aim to develop a toolkit of visual communication techniques that will help writers express complex literary ideas using illustration, photography, collage, storyboarding and publication design.

You don’t need to be an artist to benefit from this unique workshop.

Participants will work through a series of drawing exercises that will help develop visual problem solving skills and to cultivate each participant’s personal voice in visual communication. The workshop will cover the following areas: visual metaphor, visual grammar, embodied mark-making and conceptual print design to cover the foundations of graphic storytelling.

Expected Learning Outcomes

  • Students will be exposed to a diverse array of visual texts and examine the techniques employed by a variety of master visual communicators.
  • Participants will learn visual problem solving skills and visual grammar in entertaining and challenging drawing exercises.
  • Participants will understand how graphic storytelling can be incorporated into their own creative practice.

Course Breakdown
Day 1

            – SLIDESHOW Visual communication slideshow

            – Introductions

            –  SLIDESHOW Visual metaphor

            – Exercises – developing visual metaphor

            – SLIDESHOW Grammar in visual communication slideshow

            – Exercises in understanding visual grammar.

Day 2

            – Life drawing exercise

            – SLIDESHOW Embodied knowledge, performative mark making slideshow

            – Exercises in mark making

            – SLIDESHOW Smelling books and touching screens: publication design for    visual communication

             – Mini comic exercise

Food
Tea and coffee making facilities will be provided. Course participants are advised to bring their own lunch as there are no cafes within easy walking distance.

Student Requirements
Bring a pencil that feels nice in your hand, a soft eraser and whatever black pen you most like to doodle with when you’re on the phone with your mother. Participants need not be skilled at drawing however any experience telling stories in written or verbal form will be tremendously beneficial.

About the tutor
Pat Grant
is a cartoonist, writer and zine maker. His first graphic novel, Blue, was released in Australia and the United States in 2012. He’s been published all over the place, in hoity toity literary journals, in mainstream magazines and in the ratbag independent press but all of the best stuff can be found in his self-published zine called Lumpen which comes out whenever you least expect it. He is in the middle of a PhD at Macquarie University and his thesis is all about the strange and mercurial things that go on in a cartoonist’s studio when a graphic novel is being made.

 

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