So High School students like to have their cartoon portraits drawn too

After conducting a docent tour of the Princess Diana: Dresses of Inspiration for a particularly attentive and well-behaved group of students (now I know what to expect from High School JROTC students), we toured the second floor of The von Liebig Art Center and stopped at the library to draw a few souvenir cartoon portraits for the kids to take home.Since the library was not being used by any other patrons at the time, the group members had plenty of room to spread out and the freedom to chat and make helpful design suggestions for their peers' drawings while patiently waiting for their turn to get drawn. When my preferred 0.6 mm Sakura Pigma Sensei pen started going dry halfway, I switched to the 1.0 mm nib pen which provides greater coverage at a faster speed but does not allow for very small detailing on the fly. If Sakura does not start offering these two pen nib sizes in open stock soon, I am going to end up swamped with spare of 0.7 mm mechanical pencils and the other manga drawing kit components that do not get used up as fast. I really should look for an alternative cartooning event pen among my other pigmented pen sets, but the comfortable feel on most papers of the Pigma Sensei plastic nibs coupled with their smooth ink flow while speed sketching can be almost addictive (well it is to me).The students were quite imaginative with their ideas for their sketches, so we had a wide variety of fun interesting themes to draw in addition to the usual princess, mermaid, and ninja cartoon portrait requests. Quite a few wanted to be drawn as a favorite animal, for I recall sketching a couple of students as an octopus and panda bear respectively. Hope some of the students will be inspired to take up some pencils and start drawing themselves after seeing how easily and quickly their ideas could take form on paper with just some regular sketching practice. I really enjoyed the experience hosting this group, and their positive reaction to the cartooning process tells me that we are on the right tract to plan an after-school manga cartooning course for high school students for the next year.
I probably speed sketched about 35 cartoon portraits and special request drawings during 75 minutes. Thus each drawing took about 2-2.5 minutes to complete on average. By the time we were done everybody seemed pretty happy with their souvenir drawings of their visit to The von Liebig Art Center. Heartfelt thanks to Lieutenant Colonel (Ret) Paul Garrah for sending me these picture files that I used to illustrate this post(for it can be a quite challenge draw and photograph myself at the same time).