Description
Join us at Ulna Studio for an exciting new Workshop with Stephanie Gehring.
This is an incubator class for artists ready to develop their visual storytelling. You bring some favorite materials and a visual story at any point in its life cycle. We provide a space designed to help your stories hatch and grow: safety, warmth, structure, support. Come be amazed at what happens to your project if you give it care, structure, and community for five Saturday afternoons.
All levels of skill and expertise are welcome. We will mainly study two-dimensional visual storytelling, but if you can bring your own materials, any form of visual storytelling works for this class.
Visual storytelling is a language, and one we use constantly. But most of us have never been taught how to approach making visual stories. And even once you’ve realized that you’ve got a story, and you come to suspect that it may be best told visually, the range of possibilities can be dizzyingly large.
The course will offer you three things: First, it will help you develop your own understanding of what a visual story can be. Second, it will place you in a community of artists exploring their own visual storytelling. Third, it will hold space and provide accountability for you to explore what, exactly, your visual story is right now, and how to go about telling it.
The course will include four studio sessions and one field trip (one to the zine library nearby). Studio sessions will begin with a group examination of an example of visual storytelling (often a published one). Then we will do a warmup exercise that limits your options in order to launch you straight past decision paralysis and into an exploration of some specific aspect of visual storytelling. (For example, I might give you a simple story and ask you to tell it purely using color.) Then you’ll have time to work, whatever that means for you on that day. You might find yourself building on the warmup exercise. Or you might pull out that graphic novel you’ve been trying to outline. Or you might find yourself in the crying room, a tiny, contained space with a wraparound bench and a little table for anyone who wants to hash out an artistic problem out loud. Half an hour before class ends, we will gather for group reflection and feedback.
What you will need:
* a visual storytelling project at any point in its life cycle (from inchoate longing to near-complete draft)
* a journal or sketchbook and some mark-making materials you like to use in it
* your best approximation of the spirit of a toddler just learning to walk (falling down is the path)
About the instructor: Stephanie Gehring spends her days working on graphic novels, drawing portraits of pets and people, writing essays on the French philosopher Simone Weil, tutoring kids in math and science, trying to keep track of the dizzying flood of communications that issue constantly from her two daughters’ schools, baking bread, and arguing with her husband over what to plant in their tiny, full-shade vegetable garden. She used to teach or help teach writing, literature, and theology at the various colleges where she got an unnecessary number of advanced degrees, and teaching is still one of her favorite things to do. You can see her current work at stephaniegehring.substack.com.
About our classroom space: Ulna studio is a creative space located on the 2nd floor of the Portland Storage Building on SE Morrison st. There is NOT always elevator access for arrival/departure to your in-person class. Students always have the option of coming and leaving via a staircase.
Equity discount: If you are Black or Indigenous or Trans and would like 50% off class cost please feel free to use the coupon code MAGENTA at check out.