“How to Make a Comic" with illustrator Melanie Whelan
“How to Make a Comic,” a series of four short videos with illustrator Melanie Whelan, is the latest online creative engagement offering from the Linenhall Arts Centre. Designed for children and young people the videos cover areas including character creation, world building, and story making.
The series is being released throughout August on the
Linenhall Arts Centre Youtube Channel, with weekly episodes released each
Thursday (6, 13, 20, 17 August) at 11:00am. It kicked off on August 6th with a
focus on character creation, during which Melanie presented warm up exercises
and prompts for character ideas. The second instalment goes live on Thursday 13th
August and it focuses on creating a characters world. Melanie takes viewers through
expanding the world of the character by creating a home for them as well as
drawing their favourite food, their best friend and their enemy.
Melanie Whelan is an Irish Illustrator and writer based at the Custom House Studios in Westport co. Mayo. She received an MA in Authorial Illustration at the University of Falmouth, Cornwall. In Cornwall, Melanie began to think about landscape, and how we as humans relate to the land around us. This curiosity underpins her work.
In 2019 Melanie published her first children’s book: ‘The Mountain that moved’. This is a story designed to create empathy in the reader towards our landscape. The book was published by Badly Made Books in Cork. In keeping with the environmental theme of the book, the book has been printed using a ‘Risograph’ printer which uses soya based inks. www.melaniewhelan.net
