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You are dedicated to your craft. You have spent countless hours honing your skills. You have a boundless curiosity for the underlying theories and structure of communicating ideas. You are the artist who finds the connections between your medium and other communications media. You are the artist who relishes in a setback; after all, it's a new opportunity to learn and grow. Inspiration is more than a haphazard mode of thought requiring constant nurturing: it is your natural state of mind.

Lean Into Art is where you go when you're ready to push yourself as an artist in new ways. As a place to learn communication arts online it combines an art-journaling approach, the best of live and time-shifted classes, and a recognition system that encourages students to finish projects, give feedback, even participate in teaching.

It's a big art challenge - that's why we put the enticing warning in the name. You have to lean into it.

People who love to learn are the best communicators. We provide a learning system for both students to grow to teach and teachers to continue to learn. To improve, recognize, and enjoy progressing through your creative path, we journal and reflect often. 

 

 

Connecting with an audience is the first priority of communication. We provide assignments within the classes, forums, and a recognition system practice the whole creative lifecycle with an audience.

 

 

Effective communication artists explore various areas of study.  We see holistically effective artists as people that are ready to combine ideas from storytelling, visual art, business, science, and engineering to get art projects done.

 

 

We seek to provide these benefits to you

  • Fun classes that stand well on their own, yet are connectable to form your own course of study
  • Office hours and lab sessions for scheduled yet flexible topic exploration time - questions, in depth discussions.
  • Classes with projects that help you gain both the experience and the tangible finished art.
  • A variety of class options, some with live participation, others flexible any-time participation.
  • Connection with other artists via forums, virtual classrooms, (and artist profiles coming soon).
  • And more... this list will keep growing and changing as we grow with this creative learning community.

 

The Deans of Lean Into Art


 

Jerzy Drozd began his comics illustration career at 19, self-publishing his own comic books. He is the contributing editor of Sugary Serials, a comics anthology that specializes in all-ages comics serialized online and collected in print. In 2006 he completed his 197-page online graphic novel, The Front, a retelling of the first comics story he self-published.

Drozd’s main passion has always been comics, and he enjoys sharing his enthusiasm with others. In 2005 he began performing workshops at schools and universities. He worked with ArtServe Michigan on their Literacy Arts Comic Book Project, teaching the comics art form to Detroit 3rd and 4th graders. In 2008 he lead a professional development workshop for teachers at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In June 2009 he began serving as the programming director for the annual Kids Read Comics celebration, an event he co-organized with teen librarian Edith Burney, DC Comics writer Dan Mishkin, and Green Brain Comics store owner Dan Merritt.

 

 

 

 

 

Rob Stenzinger makes usable, useful, fun experiences and helps others do the same via comics, games, UX, and workshops.

In addition to providing User Experience and Game Design consulting, Rob is the creator of the comic Art Geek Zoo: The Way of Sound, the videogame Guitar Fretter, and Comicaster, an open-source content management system for comics hosted on Google App Engine. He's also the artist half of the creative team Babies Love Comics.