Demented Donkey Fights The Environment - comics by kids

A busy weekend of Comic Art Masterclasses, taking me from Milton Keynes to Sutton Coldfield, to Liverpool, and back to Milton Keynes, included a couple of days where I was trying to get the kids to tailor their strips to the theme of the environment, climate change, and the like. Here were the covers created with the pupils of Longmeadow in Milton Keynes. Because these are going to be printed in a colour magazine in the summer, I was pleased with how they came out, drawn in the class on the day and coloured when I got home.

Despite the obvious ecological theme, these two were in fact from Dyson Perrins school in Malvern and had nothing to do with the MK eco project. That's a character from Pokemon, apparently. Like I'd know. And, yes I agree, radishes do not lend themselves to a good cover design.

The comic on the left was made with the smallest group of the week, just 5 teenagers at the YMCA centre in Sutton Coldfield. I'll be going back to work with larger groups in the coming weeks. Then we see the comic from Hazeley school in Milton Keynes, where I was so keen to draw a local landmark, then got hamstrung by the fact that no MK landmark is really all that photogenic. That's a place called The Point, now you ask.

In Birkinhead I worked with the Whizz-Kids again, a group of kids with a variety of abilities, some on wheels and some not. They produced some cracking work. And to the right you can see the flipchart I did for the YMCA class. This is what you get when I arrive an hour before the class starts.

The celebrities these groups chose for my demonstration strip were Ariana Grande, Donald Trump, Paul Walker, Ant McPartlin, Lionel Messi and David Attenborough. (With the group in Hazeley I dispensed with the demo strip and, guess what, it made no difference to the quality of their work.)

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.