Covid-19 response update
Comic by 2019-20 full-year student, Elli Rhodes (on instagram as @s0ftpillow), for Desert Island Comics project, Rescue Party 2020.
This is just a word to our SAW community updating you on our most recent decisions about the upcoming school year at SAW.
We have decided it’s in the best interests of our students and staff to delay the Fall 2020 semester and start the full-immersion program in January. Fingers crossed by January we’re in a better position to safely gather in the SAW classroom. For the same reason, we’ve chosen to cancel the recently launched low-residency program but we hope we will be able to bring it back again in Fall 2021. Until then we invite everyone to join us online.
In the coming week we will launch our six-month Graphic Novel Development course, while our online year-long certificate program is going live in September. In the meantime we have a HUGE catalog of online classes in storytelling, drawing and inking that are always enrolling. And if it’s not a class you want, join us in The Mighty Network for a global community of comics-makers who have rallied during this dangerous and frightening time.
Here at SAW we’re just a small group of people (mostly the unstoppable Tom Hart) finding time between families, artistic careers and other jobs to help bring comics to people who love them just as much as us. That means there are days we miss emails, we don’t see posts in our social networks or we don’t have the creative energy we want to help people during this time. It’s been beyond incredible seeing the community around us reaching out to help in big and small ways. Thank you. One day soon we hope to have everyone at the SAW studio to say thanks in person.
Until then. Stay safe. Keep finding comfort in art. Know you’re not alone.
PS. The art featured with this update is by SAW alum, Elli Rhodes (you might remember Elli from some of our new cool graphics we’ve been sharing). In this story she imagines an ideal future for Desert Island Comics Covid-19 project, Rescue Party 2020. It’s the kind of future we could definitely get behind.