My great thanks to the Grassington Festival in North Yorkshire, who not only arranged a sellout show for the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre on Monday night, but also scheduled four days at the primary schools of the area. In all I visited six schools and every one of them produced excellent comics and were a delight to work with. These were from Grassington Primary itself.
Boyle & Petyt School has a fascinating history (which you can read here) and, like all this week's schools, occupies impressive old buildings in a stunning rural landscape. The kids managed to include the name of the village in both comic titles, and I was quite pleased with the cover designs I knocked up. The colour, by the way, is done by me after the fact then emailed back to the schools (a little bit of aftercare I like to throw in, you're welcome).
Threshfield school in the morning, Burnsall in the afternoon. These schools have done a marvellous job of joining forces to keep themselves open despite their very small class sizes. Most of this week's classes were just 16 to 18 pupils, and that included two years together. The resulting attention the kids are able to get from their teachers makes these a perfect place to send the kids, and great fun for me to work with. Even if they mentioned Donald Trump and toilets in their title.
This morning's school was in the village of Kettleton and Starbotton, so inevitably I made a running joke of calling it Starbottom and pretending I didn't understand them trying to correct me. Yes, I have the sense of humour of an eight year old. Cracoe is pronounced Cray-ko not Crack-oh, for the record, and was a fine final school of the week. Excellent work all round, thankyou again Grassington Festival.
The celebrities these eight groups chose to star in my demonstration strip were David Walliams, Lady Gaga, Michael Whittaker (a showjumper, I'm told), Michelle Obama, Jeremy Kyle, Ariana Grande, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump.
Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries & art centres. email for details. Facebook, Twitter. Promo video here.
No comments:
Post a Comment