Last year at ISAS, a few painting and drawing students attended a cartooning workshop where they learned how to shape and move the characters. Some of the students had enjoyed the workshop so much that they asked US art teacher Lauren Cunningham to make cartooning a part of the painting and drawing class. To help her students get started with this project, Cunningham invited Charles Varner, a freelance artist and a graphic design professor for TCU, to spend 3 days with the students teaching them cartooning. The project was to make a one or multi panel comic about anything related to school. Cunningham chose to focus the project about school so everyone would connect and understand the comics. Here are three comics with commentary from the artists.

One of the painting and drawing students, Regan Smith ‘17, decided to draw this image for her comic because of her own experience when she was asked what inspired her essay during writing lab. “Sometimes I was lucky just to have it done on time much less have time to be ‘inspired’,” Smith said.

Payton Childress ’19 chose to draw this as her comic to represent the struggle that students have “[It’s a struggle] to balance academics, sports, home life and many other aspects of the busy world today,” Childress said.

The comic above was drawn by Abby Hoffacker ’18. “Students at Country Day are so used to having lots of homework, quizzes, tests, and projects thrown at them that they eventually get used to it,” Hoffacker said.