Homeschool: Learning how to cartoon

Kelly and I talked briefly yesterday about turning the Betty Blonde comic strip into a little bit more of a formal, homeschool exercise.  Up until now, Kelly and Christian have drawn their comic strips as a hobby.  We decided that Kelly has enough time in her schedule to start drawing her strip during the day.  We are going to increase the size of the paper she uses.  Right now she is drawing the entire strip in four rectangles on a single piece of 8½ x 11 inch copy printer paper.  She has read a good number of books on how the working artists do their strips, so she has some ideas about how she could use better materials and a better process to produce a more professional product.  An example of where she learned some of these things can be found here.

So what we are going to do is determine what materials we need.  I think all we really need is the right kind of paper, pencils with the right kind of lead, an electric eraser, good pens for inking, a good drawing board, a comfortable chair, and a good light.  Then we need to get approval from Mom for a good place to set up everything and she will be off and running.  Her one year anniversary is coming up in a few months.  We have plans to do a T-shirt giveaway and start promoting the comic strip a little more at that time, so we really want to have the quality right.

We already carved out thirty minutes per day for Christian to work on his C++ programming, but I think we can make a little additional time for Christian to work on his 3D animations.  When he was ten or eleven he started working with Blender to animate some stories in a way similar to his claymations.  I found a great tutorial for Blender today that might be both very fun and very educational for him.  The idea would be for him to work his way through the complete tutorial, then do a three minute video.