Ty Templeton’s Comic Book Bootcamp

It’s summer here (more or less) and the kids will soon be out of school, which means it’s time for their dad to go off and teach others. Ty Templeton’s Comic Book Bootcamp Part Two will be starting up on Monday, June 28, as part of the offerings of the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop. If you have ever, at any point, taken Part One you are able to enrol in Part Two.

Students come out of Ty’s Bootcamps revved up and ready to go…(check out the work of the stalwart members of the original incarnation of Bootcamp Comics. Or Greg Dunford’s Hard Drive, or Gibson Quarter’s work on Judge Dredd, Wasted and FutureQuake #15, or Eden Bachelder’s work or…heck, there’s a lot of his students out there!) If you’re interested in being one, contact Walter Dickinson at Toronto Cartoonists Workshop. (And for those who graduate both parts of bootcamp, there’s a new, by invitation only, “Fit to Print” class, where you work closely with Ty and a bunch of your fellow graduates to put together an all-new all original comic book to be distributed at Toronto conventions…especially those with editors in attendance!)

And, just to let you know…Ty will be teaching Part One in the fall, so he won’t be teaching Part Two again until next February (at which point, there will be two classes of Part One-ers looking to sign up).

Keiren

I really like teaching.

I’m here to share.

I taught class three in my eight part COMIC BOOK BOOTCAMP again tonight; it’s my favorite week, and too much fun not to share.

For the anatomy/visualization section of class tonight, we focused on  knee joints, hinging in free space, and the leg masses attached to them– it involves crappy cardboard geometric models, mnemonic tricks, and some dirty jokes. A two drink minimum and tip your waitresses, and we’re out.

But what’s delightful about this particular class, is that’s it’s the week that we jump up from theory (vanishing points, horizons, cubes and tubes) to drawing things that you can recognize as being body parts, and being hinged in free space (it’s an old Burne Hogarth technique).

Sometimes, for the first time in their lives, students “see” in their heads, the figures moving through “space”, not as a series of tricks to get the two dimensional drawings onto the paper, but as concrete images available to their imagination.

It’s like waking up a new sense in people, and it’s FUN to watch.

Week three is one of the reason I teach this class. Oh, the millions of dollars  buys champagne and pays off my member of parliament, sure…but the looks on the faces of students who literally wake up that part of their brain for the first time during class #3…whee.

Better than sex while singing harmony on stage.

I had a student once tell me it was freaking him out now that he could “see” people’s skeletons under their skin when they moved.  I said “GREAT! That’s the whole point of these visualization tricks….to wake up your mind’s eye.”

He asked if it goes away.

Sometimes waking up a new sense is creepy. I get that.  I told him, “I’m afraid it doesn’t go away….but it moves from creepy to fun.”

When I start the Bootcamp, I like to give my class a talk about the difference between a talent and a skill, (I usually call it my TALENT IS BULLSHIT lecture).  Drawing and writing are skills, not talents.  There is nothing you need to be born with to learn how to do them well…no matter what people tell you, there is no such thing as a required “talent” for drawing.

And week three is always the week that about half the class goes “Ding” and realizes on a fundamental level what I’m talking about. Anyone can learn this stuff…even the stuff they were convinced they couldn’t learn.

It’s just fun to teach week three, and baptize the new lambs into the world of illustration.

Ty the Guy.

The bouncy rabbit hops off to mess with your garden now.

Holy Cow! Am I still promoting this comic I wrote and drew? It's been on sale for like five days already!

PS:  If you want to check out some former student work (most of it delightfully NSFW) head over here.  It’s worth the drive to Bootcamp Comics Dot Com!

And…if you’re interested in doing some learning of your own, and you’re in the GTA, new classes will start in the summer. Check out the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop for information.

Ty the Guy

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NEVER BEFORE SEEN ORIGINAL TY STORY

Here’s a story I wrote a year or so ago, with lovely artwork by “Comic Book Bootcamp” graduate Jason Laudadio, lettered by KT Smith.   It was originally slated to appear in the anthology SEX, VIOLENCE, SUFFERING AND WICKEDNESS COMICS, a title which was to feature the work of my former students…but which never came out…at least not yet.  So– you lucky legions of websurfing art seekers get to see it here, instead.

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There are more of these mini-masterpieces, originally meant for the anthology, and you all can read more of them here, at the bootcamp alumni website, but you already knew that.   Don’t just SIT there–get on over and enjoy some excellent work from a horde/swarm/nest/colony of new talents.  Oh wait, you SHOULD just sit there, it only requires a mouse click.  Just let the atrophying joy of the inter-tubes wash over your fine, stringy muscles.

Ty the Guy