Comic Storytelling for Grown Ups

A workshop in visual storytelling and comic-making with Beano artist Nick Brennan

Comics and graphic novels aren’t just for kids and aren’t just about drawing funny characters. They’re a brilliant way of telling stories, and you don’t have to be able to draw brilliantly to make one.

In this session Nick will look at some of the ways comic artists use panels, pacing, composition, expressions, speech and visual clues to make a story work. You’ll take an idea and plan how to turn it into a sequence of images, how to decide what needs to be shown (and what can be left to the reader’s imagination), and how a few carefully chosen drawings can say a lot. There’ll be practical exercises and opportunity to experiment, play around with ideas and create your own short piece of visual storytelling.
This isn’t about producing a perfect comic or learning to draw like a professional. It’s about exploring how comics work and finding your own way of telling a story with pictures. No previous experience needed. Just bring an idea — or come and find one.