I was just finishing another mammoth coloring pages session with my kids the other day when a great idea suddenly struck me. Looking at the pile of finished coloring pages featuring their current favourite hero, everyones favourite neighbourhood webslinger Spider-Man, I was thinking how great they would look if scrapbooked.
Then it hit me, we're going to be cutting out the figures as usual, and Spiderman came from a comicbook so why not ... make a giant comicbook strip with the figures?
I am always looking for way to encourage creativity with my boys. I want to engage their imaginations and help them think outside the box with materials and their applications. So this looked like a perfect fit. Art is fun and I like to show that to them!
We grabbed some giant sheets of paper and then quickly thrashed out a basic storyline using the figures we had and the poses they were in. It helped to seperate out the posing pictures from the action scenes. Then we laid them out on the giant page, talked over where we could add the boxes of the panels, decided what extras we would need to draw in to make it all cohesive and before you knew it we were back on the computer to grab more Spiderman Coloring Pages to beef up the action! By the time we were done the storyline made clear sense and by adding speech ballons the dialogue flowed easily.
All in all it was a couple of hours well spent. I now have a huge and awesomely creative Spiderman cartoon strip on my wall and everyone who enters the house sees it and comments how amazing it is. The praise does my boys wonders I am sure and secretly I am thrilled to have introduced my boys to another creative visual hobby. I will make artists out of them yet!