We’re the team at the Camosun Comic Arts Festival, a celebration of the artistic, literary, and cultural impact of comics and graphic novels. This is the third year of the event, which is the grand finale of the year-long Comics and Graphic Novels program at Camosun College. CCAF will be held this year on April 11th at Camosun College in Victoria, BC - and we need your help to make it happen! We'r
e about to launch an indiegogo campaign, so stay tuned for that; we'd love it if you'd spread the word; and we'll be ecstatic if you come to the event! CCAF is open to the public, free of charge, and like Toronto’s TCAF and Vancouver’s VanCAF, the focus is on the creators of comics. There are panels, workshops, comics jams, a superhero life-drawing class, and much more. Students and alumni will present and sell their published work, original art, and sketches alongside the pros in our artists alley. Past pro guests have included Scott Chantler, Paul Chadwick, Janine Johnston, Nelson Dewey, Sam Logan, Anne Marie Fleming, Simon Roy, Katherine Collins, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Renée Nault, Gareth Gaudin, and many others. The majority of our funding goes towards bringing the finest in contemporary Canadian comics creators to the festival - costs include travel, accommodation, and honoraria, facilities and equipment rental, printing promotional material, etc. totalling $5,000, which is our goal. We have lots of cool perks for you to choose from at all donation levels, from PDFs of all the student's comics, to published original artwork donated by our professional guests, so please check out the list. Your generous support is enormously appreciated by the students, who are the next generation of author/illustrators of the graphic novels that are bringing folks into libraries and bookstores in droves! The Comics & Graphic Novels Program at Camosun College in beautiful Victoria, BC, is unique in the Canadian post-secondary public school system. Co-created by Ken and Joan Steacy, the program offers career-focused, skills-based training in the language of visual storytelling, which includes creation of Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Comic Strips, Web Comics, Storyboards, and Edutainment Comics. This comprehensive one-year certificate program includes a diverse range of practical skills, including fiction and non-fiction writing, life drawing, pencilling, inking, lettering, and colouring in both analog and digital modes, as well as experience in production, promotion and publishing. Students graduate with a 24 page full-colour comic they create, and then present at the Camosun Comic Arts Festival. CCAF also allows students the opportunity to connect with professional visual storytellers, who generously share their experience, skills, and stories in a mentoring environment which includes portfolio reviews, one-on-one critiques, and slide presentations. We hope you will join us on April 11th, 2015, to meet the students, teachers, and mentors at CCAF!
