12/29 Workshop Part 1

The 12/29 Workshop - the first in Pittsburgh - is over! Things went very well: 10 children in all of various ages plus their parents. With only an hour, I didn't have time to go over a lot of material, but I did manage to get through a free-form pacing exercise, a quick guide on how to read a comic, and the relationship of words and images. The children and their parents were highly entertained for the entire hour, with the CCP earning accolades from the adults present.

The Toonseum was a great sponsor. The curator, Joe Wos, likes the CCP and made a number of great suggestions I'll be incorporating into future workshops there. The pacing exercise, for example, was a suggestion he gave based on his own work teaching cartooning. He also recommended that the CCP be presented as a parent-child joint activity, which would allow me to reach even younger age groups than I have in the past.

I had a chance to meet Kelli Kane of Planet Saturday, the first CCP-affiliated webcomic artist I've met in person. It's nice seeing the people who've supported the comic project by lending their art!

I used ~50 different templates from various comics, though I was only able to collect a fraction of the total comics made (I'll have numbers later). There aren't any pictures or video, as the Toonseum requires release forms for those. I'll make efforts to get some images with later workshops.

As 2008 approaches, there are several plans for the CCP's future in Pittsburgh. Joe Wos proposed taking the CCP to a local community center, where they have a strong need for volunteers. In April, I'm working on holding a special health education event to coincide with National Public Health Week, in cooperation with the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

In addition to all that, there's still an upcoming workshop with the Human Service Center in Turtle Creek (which has been delayed due to construction) and work to research and quantify the CCP's effect on children's learning. And, of course, there's the Second Comic Making Tournament at New Haven on March 8, a chance for me to take what I've learned here in Pittsburgh and bring it back to the CCP's point of genesis.