We Believe in Friday Night Workshops at SAW!

Guidelines for creating fun and impact for your Friday Night Audience

Thanks for teaching SAW students!

Family friendly, welcoming and inclusive.

SAW is dedicated to creating a space for people to be graphic novelists by giving them the tools and support they need.

Here's what we believe:

Empowering people in their art making
Inclusion of everybody
The power of sharing stories, which humanize and free us
Safe space to share stories
Tools for expression

These workshops are a part of that.

A good rule of thumb is to teach beginning adults and the kids who are also in the room with them.

Running a workshop

Workshops are Fridays at 7 PM Eastern, usually around 75 minutes total, including sharing, (sometimes go long but never past 90 minutes) and pay $150.

People need to be drawing during them, and LOVE to be sharing too, so an ideal workshop would have 30-40 minutes of drawing and then likely 30 or more minutes or more of sharing. (We do LOTS of sharing.)

Creating a friendly, welcoming environment for scribbling, dreaming and art-making is the important thing.

Visuals are great. The more you want to discuss something via a white board or scribble on a sheet of paper, and the more we can see YOU DRAW, the better!

Important notes:

You CAN promote yourself and your books and work on the internet. We want to know who you are! Sell us some books!
Guide them through the steps. The more explanation or description of how you are doing it, the better.
1. A multi-step process is usually great. Aiming for a 4-panel comic is great, but maybe with 1-2 warmups and then 4-5 minutes per panel with clear ideas about what to put in each panel is great.
We LOVE to see you DRAW. If you can arrange that (two screens, or put a camera on you drawing while we are drawing for instance.) that would be great. (Alternate, show us periodically what you are drawing.)
Show your finished piece and invite sharing. Some people sharing while others are still working is GREAT! PEOPLE LOVE to share. We've been doing this for almost 40 minutes some evenings. (We will handle the spotlighting of student work for you.)
Please give gentle affirmation to everyone if you can. Our emcee (usually Tom) will usually chime in if need be :) .
We ask people to share their work on Instagram and other social media with the hashtag #fridaynightcomics. You can see more of those here, btw: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/fridaynightcomics/

OMG - THANK YOU AND HAVE FUN!!!!

Topics

We'd love to hear your topic suggestions! Topics should be relatable! Repeating topics is ok!

A good topic lets people tell a personal story in a way they didn't expect. Or a subject everyone is going to have a personal reaction to.

As of this writing, here were a few of our last few topics:

Aidan Koch - Climate Crisis Comics
Sarah Mirk - Draw Your Teenage Self
Heather Loase - Reality TV Comics
Will Betke-Brunswick - Birds as Main Characters
E. Haidle - Book Review in Comics
Abby Kacen - Music that Moves You
Jess Ruliffson Q+A Comics

We suggest CONTENT over FORM, but if you want to teach, say "lettering" a good way might be to give them ideas from their life to letter. Like say, list the last three times you talked to your parent or child, or list your three favorite lines from movies. And from there, we can make a comic where you demonstrate ideas about lettering.

View the entire scrollable playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6nZBKexfhvv7_IA_0Jl2y6Y-EcIj5rm8 or below

Sample Workshop

Here's a quick sample made up on the spot!

Hey!

So let's say you made a book about eating and want to teach something in your wheelhouse on the subject of "lunch."

A good workshop would be:
1. Show us some of your work, talk it up! :) (5 minutes)
2. Have us do a short list of 3-5 lunch items we love, or 3-5 lunches we remember that we special. Maybe we also try to recollect conversation, or smells or sounds or anything as well. (2-5 minutes)
3. Maybe in the chat people share some part of that. (while #2 is happening)
4. Quick doodle of one item. Can research online if need be. This would be a great time for us to see your doodle as well (3-5 minutes)
5. Begin a 4 panel comic with a through-line or parameter of some sort. Perhaps, the parameters are it goes from the beginning of the meal to the end, and one panel has to be just the meal (no people.) (16-20 minutes, 4-5 minutes per panel)
That's a pretty standard workshop, roughly 35 minutes or so, and will result in some wonderful fun comics. Then we'll share! A lot of people will continue while the earliest sharers are showing...

We’d love a square promo image with your name, topic, date and time

Some sample images...

If you can’t make one, let us know early and we’ll whip one up.

You can upload Your Square Promo Image Here

Logisitics and stuff

We do it on Zoom, obviously.

Tom or another SAW personality will begin the meeting, and then make you the co-host. That will give you muting and sharing abilities. We always use Zoom's live transcription, so if a SAW host doesn't do that, we'll ask that you do it when you start.

These will be live-streamed an archived on Youtube as well, and excerpts might wind up on TikTok or Instagram reels too.

Thanks!

Legalities and stuff

We LOVE having you here, and are so grateful for your and feel like it's a party, but we also want you to know that your contribution is helping to make SAW thrive for a long time.

That means, that we might repurpose some of these videos later for other purposes. They are on our YouTube channel, but we also might put them into a SAW video podcast, or on TikTok or whatever comes next, or possibly edit them into a small workshop series for our students or something. Or they might turn up in a ratty commercial or who knows.

So this acknowledges that while you own the copyright of course, of the material, ideas, slides, drawings, etc. That we retain the right to present this again in any format!

Click here for the full garbage-y legalese but that's basically what that says, THANK YOU!