Students use common graphic editing tools suchs as layers, magic wand, drawing tools, text tool, and the paint bucket to create their own comics. This is an excellent lesson to discuss various image types such as .jpg .gif and .png. Of particular interest in this lesson are the transparency features in .gif and .png files.

In this assignment students build their own comic knock knock joke with Paint.NET. First students add a background image then add some characters. Next students add some speech bubbles and text. Find jokes for the comics on the internet.

The free graphics program used here is Paint.NET

Finished Example:

create comics finished example

Step One:

1) Download the comic backgrounds and characters and make the cartoons available to the students on a shared folder or a photo gallery.

Download: comic backgrounds and characters.

2) Import a background.

create a comic import background

Step Two:

Import the first character. Your character may have a background that needs to be removed.

create a comic import first character

Step Three:

Choose the magic wand on the toolbar and click on the background of the character. Click delete on the keyboard to remove the background.

create comic remove the background

Here is the result after deleting the background.

create comics magic wand result

Step Four:

Import an additional character and use the magic wand to delete the background if necessary.

create a comic import character

Step Five:

Use the ellipse and line tools to create speech bubbles. Fill the speech bubbles with the bucket tool.

create a comic use bucket tools

Step Six:

Use the text tool to add text to the speech bubbles. Add your name on the bottom corner of the picture.

create comics use the text tool

DONE!

Save your picture.