Superheroes and Supervillains Class Produces Amazing Art

I'm always astounded at Chinese students ability to draw. Not all, but many are very talented. To give you an idea of what the student's capabilities are when it comes to sketching out some art, I decided to post some of the final products from the recent superheroes and supervillains lesson I ran in class. A few of the student's included their short descriptions and stories as part of their pictures, but many wrote them separately.


This lesson spanned over 3 weeks (3 x 45 min lessons), and I'm very impressed at the results. You can view the full superhero and supervillain lesson plan I wrote in an earlier post here at ESL-TASTIC, but just quickly... the 3 lessons included -

• Week 1 - an introduction to superheroes and super villains using photo's and a short super heroes video clip, translating the most common heroes into English, begin to draft their own hero and villain sketches including a description of the hero and villain.


• Week 2 - Keep working on their pictures, descriptions and stories.


• Week 3 - Complete their work, describe to the class and watch a X-Men/ Wolverine cartoon episode.

You can see the difference in culture when you view the results .

They don't know much about superheroes here other than the Japanese "Ultraman", so even with my short lesson, their pictures are mostly all based on Chinese legendary figures. Marvel and DC Superheroes are becoming very popular around China though, so I guess their influence will gradually start to change. You can also see the big influence of Japanese cartoons and comics within their drawings.

The artwork and stories that I'm most impressed with are always the kids that manage to think outside of their (often sealed off) square and think of some real unusual characters like one below here with 2 pencil rivals.

The Superhero and Supervillain lesson, really works very well and whilst they very obviously still draw towards their own culture , it opens up a whole new world of what we grew up with and introduces them to new characters. It's really great to see these wonderful pieces of art and even more encouraging to see the pictures by the students that embraced the opportunity to try and change their perspective a little.

Hope you can find the same success with this activity as I have found.