Most of the animation projects I’ve done recently for myself have utilized older comic strips that I’ve made or friends have made. I felt it was important to not fuss over drafting the story, character design, etc. and focus on the animation. This was also my solution to kill procrastination. For a while, this seemed like a fun way to generate content and practice different skills (I’m not a trained animator, this is all self taught or things I’ve picked up working in different productions). The drawback has been that the style hasn’t changed much and the type of directing, framing, and pacing were very similar. It felt like a change should be made and it was time to try a different challenge. I’m an avid anime and manga consumer. At night, when I have trouble sleeping, I’ll watch anime since it’s got subtitles and I’m less worried about what I’m hearing. So I sat down one day and started making an animatic from scratch of an action sequence inspired by anime. Well actually, it’s more like a portion of a scene. Here’s what I’ve got so far…

I became “Mr. Dalkner” for a ’25 Spring semester afterschool club at my children’s school. The club was called Comicbook Clubhouse and included nearly 40 kiddos from grades 2nd through 6th (half of which were 2nd graders). That’s a lot of energy to try and manage! The focus was to read, create, and share comic books. There was a small library of used comics and graphic novels to read and plenty of supplies to create with. Each session started with a prompted drawing. “Fill a page with…” you in the future, or bugs but big, or what you’ll do on your summer vacation, etc. Then I would present a small slide show preparing them for the project of the day. During the semester we tackled projects like making comic strips, jam comics, comic lettering, designing characters, making covers and splash pages, directed drawings, and finally constructing a ‘zine style comic book. I wound up creating a whole series of lesson plans and this became more of a serious thing than I probably should have. I’m quite proud of the kids and what they accomplished and I’m very fortunate to have other parents as volunteer helpers. Without their help things would have very easily gone off the rails. I’m planning on running the club for the ’25/’26 school year. Wish me luck!

The school’s mascot is a hawk so I drew a little character for the club promos.

Short animation that was used on the school’s Instagram account announcing the start of the club.

A reminder animation used on the school’s Instagram.

Another pass of rough animation and adding a second character. If you’ve followed some of the prior posts you may remember the image this is referencing.

On to the next thing…

I added a couple of new illustrations to my portfolio.