comics brought me to capiz

 

the NCCA very kindly invited me to roxas city in capiz to give a comics-making workshop as part of its yearly creative nation summit.

 

the creative nation summit includes a very cool alternative class program where kids take a day off to learn arty things like theater acting, songwriting, jewelry making, painting, and so much more. i would've loved it as a kid. i wish this sort of thing could be done in as many schools as possible, all over the country.

 

 

the night before the workshop, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit cebu. although it only registered a 1.0 in roxas, several schools cancelled face-to-face classes the next day to make time for structural inspections. about half of our students didn't show up, but all the workshops pushed through as planned. the evening's culminating show and fireworks display went on as well. 

 

 

 

i was tasked with making a bunch of mostly "arki" students care about komiks enough to make one good page of it. and they did, some surprisingly so! they were a little blase about the lecture portion, but once we started drawing and discussing their work up front, things got lively and they were properly invested. i did the old tried-and-true "draw the next panel" game and they had fun with it. after pointing out some things they did wrong and others they did well, they drew another page by themselves and i gave some of my faves copies of my books. not bad for my second-ever workshop, i think...

 

although at least one of the kids was apparently bored enough to draw my mugshot. guess you can't win em all.