I spent all of last week teaching the Character Creation class at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa CA. The class was held everyday from 9 to 12:30 in the education room which was stocked to the gills with drawing tools, books, and a TV playing one of my favorite musical themes from Peanuts. In the 1980’s a Saturday Morning Cartoon version of Charles Schulz famous comic strip appeared and featured this catchy opening song….
Catchy, isn’t it.
The class was great and the kids worked hard (most of the time 🙂 ) at all the assignments I threw their way. The goal was to create an original character and to illustrate said character as a colored and cleaned up piece. Below is the character created by your truly from a description give by the students (3000 year old who looks like a teenager, cyborg by choice (she was harmed by killer fish in the amazon), has a pet turtle and lives in an underwater volcano. The drawing was drawn in blue pencil with a dark clean lead line on top, then xeroxed and hand colored.
The class ended with the students getting copies of there favorite pieces from the week and putting them together into a book with in the cover I illustrated with many of the characters the students created(seen below).
I also came up with this character…Iron Broccoli Man!
It was a lot of fun and I hope I can return in the near future.





