Cartoon Thinking

I was going through the art books on my shelf the other day and pulled this one out, I’ve a few different cartoon books and I was wondering if I needed to keep them all. Books I have are the How to Draw Comics, and How to Draw with your Funny Bone books. There is only the one shelf for art type books so I constantly need to revisit to see which ones I’ll keep and which to let go. I think that I will retain Dan Holt’s Cartoon Thinking for a while. With actual lessons and a simple black and white methodology, should I ever teach a cartooning class, this book will be useful.

From the Cover:

Help students learn about social issues, politics, government, moral dilemmas, the human experience, and how tomake new friends. Students develop creativity and critical-thinking skills while studying a humourous topic. They will laugh their way through the class and develop key skills.

You will have nine, two-hour lesson plans that combine the thinking part of cartooning with the art, using motivating instructions, simple handouts, a brief history of cartooning and foreign cartoons, the elements of a cartoon and artistic techniques, and the physical benefits of humour.

What you get:

Nine chapters laid out in a format to help you teach. This book is supposed to come with transparencies (which I don’t have) . I would think you could copy the black and white examples and display those. These nine lessons teach subjects such a perspective, historic cartoons, how to draw, caricatures, lettering, layout, social issues and more. Each lesson is well packed and is meant to last two hours in a class, and is geared to highschool and up.

As you can see, each lesson comes with objectives, items needed, and set out how to teach that particular lesson. This is a class where you do assign homework, and there are tests you can give as well.

I appreciated that each lesson included full pages of the transparencies that are meant to be used. I didn’t actually have the transparencies but generally speaking it would be easy to work around this.

My Thoughts:

One section of this lesson book contains a lesson on how to talk about historical cartoons. I was looking through and starting thinking that this lesson would be great for looking at the cartoons of the wars. To find some of those old cartoons (he gives suggestions for key words to search for) and then talk about this with the lad and give him a challenge of creating a cartoon of his own. Wouldn’t that be a great addition?

There is so much information in this book it’s worth keeping whether it’s methods of teaching are a bit dated or not. So it will stay on my shelves until I either find something better, or work my way through the material with my lad or other students.