After understanding how our characters move and behave, it’s time to practice telling stories using images.

One of the many brilliant things about comics is how you don’t need to use words to describe everything that happens in your story. Sometimes you don’t need to use words at all.

Telling a story without any description or dialogue is a fun way to understand how to use sequences of images to create a narrative. It also helps figure out which parts of your comic might work better in words and which ones work better as images (most of the time they will work best together).

Let’s try and create simple little storyboards, like the ones I did above. The idea is that you show a simple event in a few panels, getting the reader to understand what your action is without writing anything (well, maybe a few words here and there are ok). Pick a few different types of events and actions (a family dinner, a battle, someone doing homework, a tree growing, etc) and work out how to translate them into sequences of images in different ways.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when doing your storyboards:

• Remember you have a whole sequence of images to use, you don’t have to place all you action in one panel.

• Think about which moments you want to draw. Which ones are the most exciting and describe your action best?

• Figure out an interesting point of view to show your sequence from. Are we up close or far away? Behind the action or right in the middle of it? Does our point of view change as the story does?

• How can you show time passing? Does your sequence happen very quickly or over a long period of time?

• Remember to use as much character movement and expression as you can.

The expressions you all drew last week are super fun! Keep sending them to tibolota@gmail.com (or posting them on social media) and they’ll appear on our gallery over here.