It doesn’t take much to tell your story, even with just a folded piece of paper! Join illustrator Yuki Clarke in learning how to make your own comic zine and the story structures you can use to tell a narrative in just 8 tiny pages.

The Exercises is a spring/summer peer mentorship program that Transformer launched in March 2004 to support a select group of DC area based artists at critical points or crossroads in their professional growth and development. Concentrating on a different artistic discipline each year of the program, the goal of the Exercises is to advance participating artists’ creative careers through rigorous peer artist mentorship.  

The structure of the Exercises is designed to help stimulate and encourage participating artists as they create new work. In addition to peer critique sessions, participating artists receive mentorship and critical feedback on their work, as well as professional development insights, by guest artists, curators, gallerists, and critics. 

For this 23rd year of the program, the Exercises will focus on illustration and comics. The mentorship program will consist of biweekly meetings on weekday evenings beginning Mid-March and running through the end of June. During the course of the mentorship sessions, the participating artists will both learn from invited peer mentors about best practices, as well as get insight on developing a work or project to be presented as part of a summer exhibition at Transformer. The culminating exhibition will take place July 25 and run through September 5, 2026.  

E23: DWIGHTMESS Comic Lab will be led by Adam Dwight Griffiths, a DMV based Cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and community leader, as well as the Founder and Director of  DWIGHTMESS, a comics compound based in Silver Spring, MD, with support from Camille DeSanto, Transformer’s Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator.