Students will create traditional or digital sequential art with an efficient writing-design-illustrating method, emphasizing concept and creativity to tell a moving visual story, rooted in culture, identity, and physio-emotional challenges, and their intersection, in order to connect with the self and readers.
The Videos
YouTube
The Lesson Plans
Overview of Lessons
Lesson 1: Where Do we Come From?
Lesson 2: Where are We Going?
Lesson 3: What in the World?
Lesson 4: Piet of the Pi Paneling
Lesson 5: Emoji Alert! & Sticks n’ Stones
Reading Suggestions
About Anu Annam
Since childhood, Anu Annam has been enthralled with comics focused on social justice. The Indian comic “Birbal the Just” was their favorite because Birbal was the champion of fairness. Gaining knowledge through popular culture and illustrated books that a child could read, they realized early, the power of multiple forms of art—storytelling and visual art and especially, the cumulative combination of both. This led Annam to their current practice and mission: interdisciplinary art. Whether creating comics or bringing together artists with various styles and art forms to inspire each other and create something altogether new, they grow community connections and a greater understanding of the power of art.
In Anu Annam’s painting practice, they explore psychology through watercolor, acrylic paint, and collage weaving realistic depictions and abstractions of figures and faces to create an overall image of honest emotion. Eschewing expected facial features, chests and limbs, realistic colors, and conventional positioning, their paintings describe who their subject is, over depicting their appearance. Through these painting techniques and responding to the chemistry of my pigments as much as their subjects, Annam creates psychological studies rooted in their own battle with mental illness. Psychology, pop culture, science, science-fiction, and fantasy inform their work, guiding their strokes, balancing their mind while they balance their compositions.
These two practices culminate in teaching. Teaching is the discipline of paying it forward–in their case, through art–changing the world, through one person or group of persons at a time, creating a deep, soulful, profound reward.