Taharoa Te Reo full immersion primary school Cartoon workshop, and the Kinohaku primary school Cartoon workshop in South Kawhia Harbour.
I travelled to the remote rural primary schools of the South Kawhia area to hold cartoon workshops.
The first workshop was held at the Te Reo full immersion primary school in Taharoa, where the children who attend are from the black sand mining and farming community. This remote area has a long and strong Maori history, a dramatic rock escarpment landscape, a rugged beautiful sacred coastline, and a bunch of freewheeling adventurous youth riding horses and quad bikes.
Kinohaku primary school - a school with beautifully positioned grounds sitting at the tip of a dreamy South Kawhia Kinohaku inlet, was where I held the second workshop.
Armed with reference printouts of many faces with many expressions, and many stick figures of various postures, I drew my curious audience some rather wacky cartoon characters on the blackboard at their suggestion and then asked the children to give words to the accompanying speech and thought balloons to create an interactive cartoon storyline.
Next it was their turn, using the face expression and figure references they drew their own cartoons and created their own characters personalities and words.
The speech balloons were an opportunity to encourage their writing and story ideas, and they had free rein to write their unbridled, and often bold and wild thoughts.
I plan to do further voluntary workshops in small rural schools, it’s a rare thing to have a cartoonist visiting to do workshops.
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