Get moving with Tom Hart's opus on freeing your creative self.

A book about creativity, comics, writing with pictures, and staying engaged with your medium. 

Utilizing what he taught in classrooms for 10 years and drawn on for his own award-nominated comics, he details how to start from scratch with no ideas, how to develop ideas, how to find and finish stories, how to stay fearless and nimble, and how to constantly be creating something meaningful to you, regardless of your medium.

With more than 50 vivid exercises designed to get you creating.

Preview the book

What's Included

Eight chapters including a live example

  • Ideas and Images

    How to find your own personal ideas and images, how to tend them and how they combine to make story.

  • Characters, Drama and Story

    How characters, combined with your ideas and images can make story, and how story works to enliven those characters.

  • Poetry and Style

    What is style? What are the inherent poetics in comics? What do lines and marks do and mean? This is the deep part of the book!

How To Say Everything retails for $23.95 on Amazon!

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Introduction by Zippy Creator Bill Griffith:

I have a shelf full of “How to” books on cartooning. They’re all amusing or entertaining  in differing ways, but I’ve never really taken one seriously. Why? Because they all teach the same  thing: how to draw and write like the author of the book.

Along comes Tom Hart’s contribution to the genre and everything’s up for grabs.  He doesn’t have a “one size fits all” approach at all.  Whether your interest is in one-row or two-row comic strips, gags or complex graphic novels, there’s a lot to think about here. 

Tom takes a “deep background” approach to comics. Unlike most instructional books on the medium, here every layer is peeled back and discussed, from panel and page structure to how to breathe life into a compelling character.

Tom really understands that comics are a form of literature, albeit with pictures, and that all the “rules” of fiction writing also apply here. My rule of thumb on creating comics has always been that they’re equal parts writing and drawing--with writing being a little more equal.

When you read comix, you’re really taking a guided tour of the cartoonist’s brain. Ideas and point of view are just as important as drawing and compositional skill, perhaps a bit more so if the reader is to stay involved. 

Whether your interest is casual or professional, “How To Say Everything” will help you tap your Inner Cartoonist.

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Course curriculum

    1. A message from the author

    2. Download your file here!

    3. Before you go...

About this course

  • Free
  • 3 lessons
  • 0 hours of video content

Testimonials

“For the first time ever, I have the storyline for a comic! I feel like I'm just starting to hear my own voice. Yay!!!”

“I have never really written a comic in this way, and I think it is really helping to get me "unstuck"…this class is doing a number on me, so thanks! ”

“New ideas and details keep jumping out that I wasn't expecting and I feel like I am really intimately getting to know this character... ”

They love it on Instagram!

Instructor(s)

Instructor Bio:

STAY INSPIRED

Tom Hart is a cartoonist has been the Executive Director of The Sequential Artists Workshop, a school and arts organization in Gainesville, Florida since 2012.

His 2016 memoir, Rosalie Lightning, debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List and was featured on many Best-Of-2016 lists.

His Hutch Owen series of graphic novels and books, were nominated for all the major industry awards. His The Collected Hutch Owenwas nominated for best graphic novel in 2000. He was an early recipient of a Xeric Grant for self-publishing cartoonists, and has been on many best-of lists in the Comics Journal and other comix publications. He has been called “One of the great underrated cartoonists of our time” by Eddie Campbell and “One of my favorite cartoonists of the decade” by Scott McCloud. His daily Hutch Owen comic strip ran for 2 years in newspapers in New York and Boston, and his “Ali’s House”, co-created with Margo Dabaie was picked up by King Features Syndicate.

He was a core instructor at New York City’s School of Visual Arts for 10 years, teaching cartooning to undergraduates, working adults and teens alike. Among his students were Dash Shaw, Sarah Glidden Box Brown and other published cartoonists like Leslie Stein, Jessica Fink,Josh Bayer, Brendan Leachand many others. He has taught comix and sequential art at schools and institutions all around New York City for more than 10 years, and has conducted week-long workshops from Maine to Hawaii. He also teaches sequential art in the School of Art and Art History at UF.

His website is http://www.tomhart.net

Tom Hart

Executive Director of The Sequential Artists Workshop

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