From Life to Comics - A Graphic Storytelling Workshop for Tweens & Teens
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Alliance Française de Portland |
Can an ordinary moment become a comic?
Join comic artist Ziyed for a hands-on graphic storytelling workshop for tweens and teens that begins with drawing from real life and ends with a short visual story.
Participants will start with several quick observation drawings of a real subject. They will then choose one drawing and imagine what might have happened immediately before that moment and what could happen immediately afterward. The original observation becomes the middle moment of a short three- to six-panel comic. Through this process, participants will discover how comics use differences between images to create time, movement and narrative.
The workshop introduces observation, simplification, character action, setting, panels, visual continuity and basic sequential storytelling without requiring participants to create an elaborate plot or arrive with previous experience. The emphasis is on experimentation: looking closely, making choices and seeing how an ordinary moment can suggest a larger story. This workshop grows out of Observation Station, Ziyed's ongoing project exploring how live observation, movement, place and collected experience can become source material for comics and graphic narrative.
No previous comics or drawing experience is required. Teens, tweens, and focused kids are welcome to this workshop, which will be in French. Materials are provided.
This event is free, but an RSVP is required.
Observation Station is a mobile, site-responsive drawing installation that transforms climbing gyms and movement spaces into observation spaces. Positioned directly within environments of physical discipline, the project uses observational drawing to capture the biomechanics, rhythms, and spatial negotiations of bodies in motion.
Moving beyond traditional representation, the project champions a collaborative visual archive. LGBTQ+ athletes and underserved community members are not passive subjects, but active contributors to a shared visual archive, demonstrating how embodied practices generate unique forms of visual knowledge.
Ziyed is a French-American visual artist working through graphic narrative and observational drawing. An alumnus of the ESMA School of Arts
in Toulouse, his practice investigates the biomechanics, spatial tension, and communal dynamics of bodies in motion. A dedicated civic
participant, Ziyed serves as a Public Art Juror for the City of Eugene and has exhibited extensively, including at the Hult Center's
Mayor’s Art Show and the Mairies of the 4th and 11th Parisian Districts. His sequential artwork has been published internationally by
major outlets including Image Comics and BOOM! Studios.
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