Annie Mok

franksantoro:

FRANK SANTORO CORRESPONDENCE COURSE for COMIC BOOK MAKERS. NEW COURSE STARTS JANUARY 1st 2013 - Email me capneasyATgmail for application guidelines. I WILL SEND YOU A LINK TO THE LAST COURSE so you can check it out. Ten students per course. 8 week course. 500 bux. Payment plans available. I will work with you. This is the 6th course I have done and I have it down to a science. Great way to study comics for those who can never find the time to make them. Correspondence method works with your schedule. I will show you. You can do it! Applications due by Xmas - … http://www.tcj.com/category/columns/riff-raff/page/10/

—————

ANDREW WHITE of comicsworkbook fame and maker of the image above - was once one of my correspondence students. Check out what Mr. White sez about the course:

I’ve been meaning to talk in more detail about my experience in Frank’s course. You can of course read the product of my time working with him here, and comparing that piece to the comics I’ve done previously is probably the most succinct indication of how thoroughly Frank helped me to rethink my process.

I don’t want to give away too much about the specifics of the course — not just because of all the little secrets Frank reveals over the course of 8 weeks, but also because he has this great way of tricking you into approaching things in new ways by making you do something that seems completely unintuitive — until all of a sudden it isn’t. That was one of the most rewarding parts of the course for me, actually. I had more than a few unexpected moments of realization about my work and even comics in general that I’m not sure I can fully articulate just yet because I’m still working over most of them in my head.

Let me tell you one story, though, that I think illustrates how great of an instructor Frank is and how much you can get out of his course. A few weeks into the course, I had just done a first draft of the colors for one of my pages, and I was pretty happy with it. I thought it looked good. Frank wrote to me, saying that the page looked okay, but that maybe we should get on Skype and talk about it. I don’t remember everything that he said — I should have taken notes, and I made sure to do so for every Skype session afterwards — but whatever he told me made me realize that the page wasn’t working at all. It just clicked. I could see it. My second draft, which I ended up incorporating into the final version of that page, was infinitely better.

I have at least a dozen more stories like that which I could tell, but I’ll just say this: take the course. You won’t regret it.

Frank’s course helped give me the tools to find more pleasure and comfort in drawing comics than I can recall. Like acupuncture for yr drawing brain. I unlearned methods that felt stilted and constipated to me, and went down fresh roads. You see this in the switch in my James Joyce book from “Araby” - traditional roughs, pencils, then inks - to “Portrait of the Artist.” Big leap, and that was just the start. Also, when I began to draw in ways that felt more natural and were not Milt Caniff “correct,” I became more open and malleable in other areas of my life. I believe my time at MCAD helped give me a lot of tools, but if you want to talk about speed of improvement for a minimal amount of classtime dollars, Frank’s class kills it.

(via comicsworkbook)