Saturday, September 13th
Choose Your Own Path – Making Interactive Comics with Multiple Endings
09/13/2025 | 11:00am – 12:30pm | Forest Glen Room
Choose Your Own Path stories provide a fun way to make zines come to life in the reader’s hands! In this workshop, you’ll learn about what makes these stories work and how to create interactive zines that are funny, scary, or personal. By the end, you’ll have an 8-page zine with branching paths, a story with multiple endings, and the knowledge of how to make them yourself!
Panelists: Bread Tarleton
Silly Goose: Joke Slam!
09/13/2025 | 11:00am – 12:30pm | Glen Echo Room
Calling all bird nerds! Coco Fox and Alex Driussi are back, and they want your help drawing quack-up comics about BIRDS. This egg-citing workshop is for ALL ages and ALL drawing levels! Coco and Alex will teach you how to brainstorm jokes, sketch them out and leave with a finished gag-cartoon drawn owl by yourself.
Panelists: Coco Fox, Alex Driussi
Foldy Comics Workshop
09/13/2025 | 12:30pm – 2:00pm | Forest Glen Room
Learn how to make a dynamic 5-page minicomic using a single sheet of paper! No cutting, no staples. The “foldy comic” is a simple yet challenging format: you will learn to design a comic that uses unfolding and changing size and orientation as part of your storytelling toolkit. Matt Madden will share examples of this rare minicomic format and guide you through the process.
Panelists: Matt Madden
The Intersection Between Abstraction & Representation
09/13/2025 | 12:30pm – 2:00pm | Glen Echo Room
Comics lend themselves to occupy the same roles as performed by graffiti, fine art, graphic art, and a myriad of other visual approaches. This workshop, taught by universally beloved and yet inexplicably underrated artist Josh Bayer, invites people to consider some abstract methods for making their own art, a combination of lecture and worship activity. Sources of reference may include an array of visualists such as Jean Dubuffet, George Herriman, Franz Kline, and Ben Shaun. Bring your sketchbooks.
Panelists: Josh Bayer
Creating Your Own Avatar
09/13/2025 | 2:00pm – 3:30pm | Forest Glen Room
Feeling held back from drawing comics because you struggle with realistic figures? This workshop is for you! We’ll explore how to create compelling characters using abstract elements, demonstrating how these designs can often be more expressive and relatable than photorealistic ones. Discover the power of abstraction in character design!
Panelists: Anna Sellheim
Figure Drawing For Cartoonists
09/13/2025 | 2:00pm – 3:30pm | Glen Echo Room
Learn how to apply figure drawing to making more confident, believable, and dynamic comics characters! This will be a live figure drawing workshop, so be prepared to draw! 18+ and please be respectful; we will have a live nude model. Hosted by cartoonist/lecturer Danielle Corsetto, and cartoonist/model Babs New(d).
Panelists: Babs New(d) and Danielle Corsetto
Illustrating Insides: Internal Anatomy For Comics
09/13/2025 | 3:30pm – 5:00pm | Glen Echo Room
Comic artists love getting their characters hurt, but accurately depicting an injury can be a daunting challenge. How do you find accurate information or useful visual references? In this workshop, we will guide you in interpreting various anatomical references as we illustrate the human heart together. We will teach you cardiac anatomy and transferable skills to researching and illustrating other medical subject matter. This is a chance to have your questions answered by medical and artistic professionals and receive real time advice and critique. The workshop is hosted by three cartoonists who also work in medicine: M.D. student Yue Peng (She Makes Hungry), medical illustrator C.S. García Martínez (Know Not a Man), and cardiac proceduralist Chloe Cunningham (Cargo).
Panelists: Yue Peng, C.S. Garcia, Chloe Cunningham
Mastering Pictorial Composition: Rewire Your Brain
09/13/2025 | 3:30pm – 5:00pm | Forest Glen Room
Do you feel like your finished illustrations just aren’t landing the way you want them to, but you’re not sure why or what to do about it? Overwhelmed by the blank page, or intimidated by the complexity of what you are trying to express? What if there was a way to dramatically level up your image-making skills in a simple, 5-10 minute exercise you can do anywhere, any time, with a minimum of tools? In this workshop we’ll explore why some images immediately grab your attention while others leave no lasting impression at all, and how you can unlock this power in your own work with a fun, easy technique anyone can learn.
Panelists: Celine Loup
Haunted: A Workshop Of Haunted Items
09/13/2025 | 5:00pm – 6:30pm | Forest Glen Room
Come alive, come dead, or come somewhere in-between. Let’s get haunted. And by haunted, Ashley Jablonski means using prompts of everyday items and mixed media materials (including watercolor) to create a comic about something that haunts each item. Materials included.
Panelists: Ashley Jablonski
Physical Self-Care For Artists And Writers
09/13/2025 | 5:00pm – 6:30pm | Glen Echo Room
Living a creative and productive life centered around a sketch book, digital device, desk, or small-scale work area can be liberating for your mind, but hard on your body. Hours of daily writing and drawing can lead to repetitive stress injuries, eye strain, stress, and all sorts of pain. This workshop explores the relationships between your creative environment, tools, hand/wrist alignment, and posture, when working with traditional or digital equipment. Learn some ergonomics hacks and how to prevent eye strain. Explore ways to make drawing and writing postures easier on your body. Practice some self-care techniques that will loosen tight muscles and reduce stress.
Panelists: Kriota Wilberg
Sunday, September 14th
Connecting With Your Audience Through Cover Design
09/14/2025 | 12:00pm – 1:30pm | Glen Echo Room
Learn the basics of designing a compelling graphic novel cover with Briana Loewinsohn and Thien Pham! We’ll cover key principles like composition, typography, and visual storytelling to help you create eye-catching designs that reflect your story. Whether you are self-publishing or working with a graphic designer at a publishing house, you’ll gain practical tips for translating your novel’s themes into a visually striking cover. Walk away with a solid foundation in cover design to kickstart your own creative projects.
Panelists: Briana Loewinsohn, Thien Pham
Silencing Your Inner Critic
09/14/2025 | 12:00pm – 1:30pm | Forest Glen Room
We all have an inner critic! The Inner Critic asks: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? But the critic has no idea who you are. The critic only knows who you’re not. In this workshop Tom Hart will show the techniques he has used to train it to see you as you are, to learn new habits to help you use that voice to stay creative and curious.
Panelists: Tom Hart
Drawing Anatomy In Action
09/14/2025 | 1:30pm – 3:00pm | Forest Glen Room
No matter what we are doing, the shapes of our bodies are determined by the positions of our bones, the contraction and stretch of our muscles, and the contours of our tissues and skin covering the anatomy underneath. Understanding anatomy helps us create real or imaginary characters—in any style—that are consistent and physically believable. This workshop explores drawing the body based on the anatomy of movement. Kriota Willberg will—literally—draw on Babs New(d), our live model, tracing muscles and bones for participants to draw in any style they choose. 18+ and please be respectful; we will have a live nude model.
Panelists: Kriota Willberg, Babs New(d)
Jokes! Jokes! Jokes! A New Yorker Gag Cartoon Workshop
09/14/2025 | 1:30pm – 3:00pm | Glen Echo Room
In this workshop, New Yorker Cartoonist Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell will teach you how to find humor and inspiration in your day-to-day life and translate it into relatable, well-crafted gag cartoons. Paper and pens included but make sure to bring your funny bone.
Panelists: Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell
Drawing The Shapes Of Feelings
09/14/2025 | 3:00pm – 4:30pm | Forest Glen Room
Mara Ramirez will lead you on a drawing exercise that translates a poem or song lyrics into a comic with abstract imagery. They will encourage you to see how far you can push either image, abstraction, or the combination of word and image.
Panelists: Mara Ramirez
How To Make A Tijuana Bible (Bring Your Own Uncensored Content)
09/14/2025 | 3:00pm – 4:30pm | Glen Echo Room
Legendary cartoonist Gary Hallgren will run a hands-on workshop on how to create your very own Tijuana Bible mini comic. Hallgren was a member of the notorious Air Pirates, a renegade gang of Underground cartoonists who ran afoul of the Walt Disney Company (and the legal system) for their unauthorized Mickey Mouse parody comic books in the early 1970s. He will be joined by comics historian John Kelly, who explores the strange story of the Air Pirates in issue #2 of his publication, Dummy. Dummy #2 also has a look at some X-Rated Mickey Mouse Tijuana Bibles from the 1930s which are a direct link to the Underground Comix of the late 1960s. 18+ only.
Panelists: Gary Hallgren, John Kelly
Roll The Dice! Comics Storytelling Via D20
09/14/2025 | 4:30pm – 6:00pm | Glen Echo Room
Artist of all ages/skill levels welcome! Join Miss Lasko-Gross (Faculty BFA Comics, SVA) as we will be rolling D20’s to design an original character, and then drawing a one page comic (with provided pencils/template.) Depending on how fast attendees make it though the prompts, we will either have a critique or a quick gallery. Attendees will take home their comic page.
Panelists: Miss Lasko-Gross
The Power Of Reference
09/14/2025 | 4:30pm – 6:00pm | Forest Glen Room
Creating empathetic characters, immersive worlds, and realistic props from either reference or imagination alone can be a daunting task. This workshop explores the importance of harnessing both your creative imagination and good research practices, combined for a liberating and transformational creative process. Learn some quick and efficient reference and research tricks, how to think spatially and draw sculpturally—using reference as inspiration rather than a crutch.
Panelists: Nathan Fox