The Providence Comics Consortium’s “Sketchbook Church,” writes artist Walker Mettling, is “not church in the religious way, church in the Sunday morning way. Maybe in the coffee and bagels way.” It’s church if, say, your church involved gathering together with a bunch of people and inventing monsters.
Since May 6, it’s been meeting Sunday mornings at 11 at Ada Books, 717 Westminster St., Providence, where the Consortium has its printing office. Kids and grownups of all skill levels are welcome. Donations are encouraged (looking at you, cheapskates). Sketchbooks and drawing utensils are provided.
“Sketchbook Church” offers “generative sketchbook games,” explains Mettling, whose personal adventures include being the 2017 Rhode Island School of Design Museum Artist Fellow (an artist in residence). “Sketchbook Church” is basically a friendly group drawing session with weirdo prompts. The aim is a “greater than the sum of its parts mind meld.”
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Mettling says, “I’m kind of sitting on this huge wealth of sketchbook games that we use with the kids in the libraries making the Comics Consortium books.”
Begun in 2010, the Providence Comics Consortium offers free comic book classes for youth at the Providence Community Libraries and publishes group books and newspapers. It’s toured across the state and farther Away. Also, “the kids make assignments for adult cartoonists all over the world.”
At AS220’s annual Foo Fest in 2014, the Consortium led a parade—including a papier-mâché school bus—and drew comics that offered advice in response to festivalgoers’ questions.
Mettling says, “Anybody who does a workshop is part of the Consortium,” including kids who have since become grownups with beards.
“I think people don’t realize how transcendent it can be,” Mettling says. He recalls one boy who participated in a library workshop with his brother, who was generally more of a sports kind of guy. “Having a tangible way to see what his brother’s mind looked like—I think he didn’t realize how his bother’s imagination differed from his. But through these sketchbook games, he had this epiphany of how his brother’s mind worked the same as his and differently from his.”
Over the years, people have asked Mettling for a version of the workshop for grownups. “Having a less formal Sunday morning drop-in sketchbook session made more sense,” he says. “It was less stressful.”
So welcome to “Sketchbook Church.” Last Sunday morning, with about 15 people in attendance, Mettling says, “We played a game called ‘Plant Diseases.’” As a group, they wrote out “different imaginary and real plants” and “occupations/types of people” on scraps of paper, put them in vessels, then pulled out one of each category and raced to draw the inspiring combination in 30 seconds.
“That person gets to decide what ailment or what kind of benefit would happen to that person if they were to encounter that kind of plant,” Mettling explains.
“We started [the sketchbook game] ‘Mutation’ with a cactus that had an arm with extra elbows and each person would change it in a way,” Mettling recalls. “It was an aquatic bunny that also had cactus parts later on. Talking about this stuff, it’s kind of like talking about your dreams later on. It’s hard to translate it into the vibe that you can actually catch doing this stuff.”
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