Have had a wonderful day over at Southsea Infants in Portsmouth with some enthusiastic year 2s. They're creating their own superhero characters so I spent the morning with three different groups sharing some different ways to draw cartoon faces, superhero poses and bizarre costumes so they could then go away and apply some of those techniques to their own work.

The afternoon was a little more tricky. I had two sessions, each of just 45 minutes, in which to demonstrate how a comic page is put together. The idea was to get across where to place speech bubbles, how to lay out a panel, and so on, but at the same time as the children suggesting the theme of the strip, the direction of the story and the nature of the content - which even included one girl dictating the style of cartoon eyes on Hardy - something we'd discussed different ways of illustarting from the morning session.

45 minutes is not a lot of time, and it's important to keep the children enagaged while your back's to them as you draw, so it becomes very manic, but is an awful lot of fun. The second story was about a robot invasion that involved a cup of tea being spilt on an Anti-Naughty Machine in a robot factory. Hats off to the children for their wild and unusual ideas throughout, including the line "Yummy, pickled Nelson" in the Horatio strip. Great fun all round.