The 2024/2025 school year was another special one. Thanks to generous support from the Ohio Arts Council, I was able to return to two career tech high schools, Springfield-Clark Career Technology Center and Tri-Rivers Career Center for semester and year-long residencies, respectively.
Before the residencies began I coordinated with the instructors to design a comics curriculum that supported the material they were teaching. For Springfield-Clark’s Computer Graphic Arts students, I led lessons in comics exploring how word balloons and panel contents use visual hierarchy to support clear composition. Tri-Rivers Interactive Media students learned how thumbnailing comics supported their storyboading for film projects. The kids can sometimes treat me like an exciting outsider, and I enjoy using my visits to validate that the things they’re learning have a variety of applications outside of school.
And the students explored a variety of approaches for comics-making. I describe my approach to teaching as using comics as a framework to remind everyone that they’re creative creatures. I operate under a broad definition of comics when I teach–as long as it’s sequential images, it’s comics. Some students drew on paper, some in Procreate, some in Adobe Illustrator. And some created their comics using Blender:
They made their own models, rendered them as images, and assembled them into comics pages using Photoshop.
This is all exciting enough, but we also had some outings to celebrate our work together. In early April the students at Springfield-Clark took a field trip to the Columbus Zoo, where we sketched together.
And this Saturday, May 3, the students from Tri-Rivers will be tabling with their new comics at both Thunderfury Comics and Birch Tree Bookery in Marion, Ohio, for Free Comic Book Day!
All of these rich experiences are made possible by the Ohio Arts Council’s TeachArtsOhio grant. This program allows educators to host a visiting artist for as few as ten days to an entire school year. The Ohio Arts Council pays the teaching artist’s fees, and the school provides the necessary supplies. This program has profoundly changed my life, allowing me to work in schools all over Ohio. The Ohio Arts Council and its partners also organize the Teaching Artist Roster, a handy directory of trained teaching artists representing a wide variety of artistic disciplines.
If you’re an educator in Ohio, I strongly encourage you to check out the grant opportunities at the OAC!
My deepest gratitude to the Ohio Arts Council, the instructors who invited me into their schools, and the students who navigated the barrels of ambiguity that comes with art-making! It’s been a really lovely year.
