As it’s the anniversary year of the first moon landings, the current exhibition at the Institute of Physics is all about the moon, where I ran comic strip workshops yesterday. After some live drawing all about facial expressions and using comic strip framing, I encouraged children to become space explorers, asking them to draw their adventures. 
What challenges and/or dangers did they encounter, and how did they overcome them? One story showed an astronaut trying to write in zero gravity, with her words just floating away, another involved cosmic cake … immense fun, and exciting to see children gain confidence in their narrative and drawing skills throughout each session. Great stuff!
Here’s a page I drew for the youngest children in the workshops. They drew faces on the astronauts and the very youngest did some colouring in. I’ve included Ed White’s glove by the way. He was the first to do a space walk in 1965, and lost one of his gloves, which circled the earth for about a month before burning up in the earth’s atmosphere. And here’s a photo of the floating glove …
PS Although he didn’t actually come to my workshops, cartoonist/artist and occasional astronaut Glenn Marshall kindly decided to add some facial expressions etc to my space characters this morning …
