Cartooniversity Camp was in full swing at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse Community Center (ORSCC) July 14-18 and will repeat at Redmond’s Farrel-McWhirter Park Aug. 18-22, as well as Bellevue’s Kelsey Creek Farm Aug. 25-29.
The week-long day camps, for 9-to-14-year-olds, are taught by award-winning editorial cartoonist Jeff Johnson, who lives on Redmond’s Education Hill. They provide kids with a relaxing environment in which to flaunt their silliest ideas and learn drawing techniques used by professionals.
“About 90 percent (of participants) draw like crazy at home — a few are just here for a summer activity,” Johnson commented on the afternoon of July 16.
The group had just returned from a lunch break at Anderson Park. Most were working on a project called “Surreal Cereal,” designing a wacky cereal box. Johnson’s prototype was for a cereal called Pork Flakes and featured a drawing of a deranged-looking pig and the fun facts “100 percent fat! … No nutritional value at all! … Made with real bacon!”
Other projects throughout the week included puzzles, a “Wanted” poster, trading cards, caricatures and W.O.C. or Wheel of Confusion. Each student got four words — a random noun and verb, an occupation and a location — and had to draw a scene incorporating images for each word. Johnson then would guess the words based on what they drew.
“I show them how to crop characters for depth. They work on horizon lines and vanishing points,” Johnson explained. “I used to do adult classes, too, but it really takes coaxing to get them to draw. Kids are exposed to, bombarded with, cartoons so they have an inherit knowledge of the art form and I encourage experimentation.”
He does a family class about twice a year at the ORSCC and said that whether he’s teaching a child or adult to draw, he believes, “If they say, ‘I can’t draw,’ I say that they probably didn’t finish the sentence. It’s like saying ‘I can’t ride a bike’ when what you meant to say was, ‘I can’t ride a bike like Lance Armstrong.’”
Shelby Gramer, who’ll enter ninth grade at Redmond Junior High School this fall, was at Cartooniversity Camp for the third time.
“I love it,” she said, as she colored a whimsical dragon on her CosmO’s cereal box. “I’ve yet to take an art class at school because of language and other requirements.”
Since art is an elective course at the junior high and high school levels, it’s common for students to think about drawing but not have the opportunity because they can’t squeeze it into their schedules. Summer camps like this one or after-school programs may be their only creative outlets.
Haley Hague, working on a Kitty Krunch cereal box — “The cereal made out of cat food! … Made with real catnip! … Free toy inside!” — was looking forward to seventh grade at the Renaissance School, a Lake Washington School District Choice school on the campus of Eastlake High School. Arts are incorporated into all curriculum there.
As Bryan Lapierre, soon to be a seventh grader at Redmond Junior High, worked on Kick Butt Cards featuring characters named Drago the Dragon, Cannibal Bunny and Scrap, Johnson took requests from the “peanut gallery,” regarding what they’d like him to sketch on a huge piece of paper that was taped to a blackboard on the wall.
The kids clamored for a cartoon of “Little Red Riding Hood Gone Bad.” Suggestions included, “Give her scars and buck teeth!”
Johnson drew her with a devious expression, squeezing the neck of a dumbfounded Big Bad Wolf.
Kids guessed a number from 1 to 20 to determine who’d take Johnson’s poster home at the end of the day. Vibhu Iyer, going into sixth grade at Ben Rush Elementary, was the lucky winner.
Johnson, who launched Cartooniversity in 1988, said his background was actually in fisheries biology. He said studying wildlife helped with drawing forms but, “you gotta wake up loving what you do,” and at the ORSCC, it showed that he does.
For information about Cartooniversity classes in Redmond, call (425) 556-2300 or visit www.redmond.gov. For other information, visit www.cartooniversity.com.
