Teaching the drawing techniques
By Chris Simon

A Goodfellow Public School student draws a picture of the animated cat Garfield, during a Freeze DNA comic Photo by Chris Simon book development session at the school last week. Several hundred students participated in the program.

Any child can learn to draw.

Thus, any child can become a comic book animator, if they work hard enough. Members of the Freeze DNA comic art team were spreading that message through free one hour workshops on the fundamentals of comic book design at Goodfellow Public School last week.

Hundreds of children participated in the workshops, which aim to team children how to draw facial expressions, animals, and original characters.

Sponsored by the Ontario Arts Council, the program also attempts to help children, specifically boys, learn the necessity of reading and writing.

"Where ever you go, kids know cartoons; they love to draw," said Freeze DNA executive director Justin Stanberry. "It's instant gratification for students. They feel like they achieved something at the end of these workshops. We start off with the simplest shapes, something they can take along after the workshop. Most kids know how to do stick figures, and we take it to that next level.

Photo by Chris Simon Anthony Stanberry, CAO of Freeze DNA, gave several hundred children at Goodfellow Public School a one hour comic animation lesson last week.

"It helps them with literacy, especially with the boys. We like to encourage boys to read. We know girls like to read already, where boys tend to flip through the pages."

Freeze DNA was created in 2000 by Justin, his brother Anthony, and Jermaine and Sylvia Smith. The group tours the province, teaching children the fundamentals of animation.

The group was created as a design and illustration house for children and youths. The Freeze DNA team offers some of the most innovative and compelling products pushing the limits of character development, creating an educational and diverse world for kids and teens alike, said Justin.

The group developed a comic book called Blac Ice as a marketing tool, but it soon found an audience.

"We started a company to design and illustrate other people's add campaigns," he said.

"A lot of teachers and students liked the book. We realized there was a void in black superheroes, so we started Blac Ice. We started teaching classes as an after school program in 2003, and we had a lot of parents and teachers ask how to develop their own comic books. We were funded to do an Ontario tour."

The program also supports several initiatives currently taking place at Goodfellow, says principal David Brownlee.

"We brought them in as part of our effort to enhance our arts programming," he said. "Arts intelligence is a something we need to honour for our students. Our children can be successful at a variety of things, so we need to be making sure we're offering learning opportunities."

Brownlee says reading materials like comics and graphic novels help improve literacy, by making reading enjoyable for students.

"We use graphic novels, which may appear at first to look like comic books," he said. "We're seeing student engagement because they're willing to read. We know there's gender differences in terms of attention to reading and development of skills. We need to have all of our students engaged.

"Having a wide variety of print media brings in a wider audience. It helps the students become readers and writers, because they can compose their own graphic novels and feel good about their dynamic piece of work."