Happy equinox! 💀 Spookier classes for a spookier season!

The days are getting shorter and spookier, so we've made sure our calendar reflects that! Join us for a variety of special seasonal classes like Paint a Gouache-shroom, Draw Skulls!, Collage Masquerade, Make Your Own (Cursed) Lafufu, Magic Wand LED Circuit Craft, and more!

We've also got some NEW offerings coming up in October, like After School Art for KIDS, Intro to Colored Pencil Illustration, and Cut the Crap: A No BS Collage Workshop. Show them some love!

Teen Art After School

The next 5-class series of our fall Teen Art Program is FUNDAMENTALS OF PRINTMAKING and it begins October 15! Make plans for it, and/or the next series, The Art of Illustration, which begins November 19th.

TONIGHT, September 23, 6 PM: Get some fresh eyes on that piece you've been staring at for way too long at Fresh Look! Put your eyes on others' pieces instead and see what everyone else is up to! Share ideas and discuss direction, artistic visions, and more, in a supportive environment! 👀 FREE MEETUP.

Wednesday, September 24, 6 PM: This month's Watercolor Landscapes will focus on the pigment power of “Quinacridone Pink.” Explore the landscape attributes of still life with peppers, apples, and other fall staples! 🌶️🫑🍎🍏

Thursday, September 25, 6 PM: Intro to Needle Felting is everything you need to get started on stabbing random blobs of wool into submission! Is it your dream to felt a little figure of your cat out of their cat hair? Don't let your dreams be dreams. We'll have the needles. You do the stabbing! BYO cat hair if u want, or save that project for home. ;P 😼

Friday, September 26, 10 AM: Make beautifully unique, individually made prints of your work on paper, on fabric, on whatever! All you have to do is carve that design out of a block! Learn how at our monthly Block Printing Workshop! Are you just making a giant stamp? Yes, basically! It's fun! ⏹️

Friday, September 26, 11 AM: It's the VERY LAST Botanical Sketching at Ballard Locks of the year! Welcome the change of seasons with one last morning in the garden, learning to observe, as well as to sketch! 🌿 After this, the next Botanical Sketching isn't until March!

Friday, September 26, 3 PM: Craft your own characters, stories, and make-believe worlds while getting an introduction to storytelling and cartoon illustration in Cartooning & Character Design for Comics! Explore shapes to build characters, how body language and facial expressions help show who a character is, story and backstory elements, and the different types of characters that can be created, from people, to animals, to talking plants or objects.

Friday, September 26, 6 PM: Wow, is it the last Friday already? The first month of Halloween is nearly over and it's time to ring in the second month? Celebrate the spooky season, hang out with your fellow queer artists, and make some time to make art at QU-ART! 🏳️‍🌈 FREE MEETUP.

Saturday, September 27, 11 AM: Capture a caricature of your favourite critter with Watercolor Pet Portraits, and get a better handle on the medium while you're at it, too. :) 🐶

Saturday, September 27, 2:30 PM: Professional screen printing often utilises large setups and require lots of space, but DIY Screen Printing will teach you all the necessary fundamentals of screen printing on a DIY mini screen! 🧤

Sunday, September 28, NOON: Why are so many artists in love with alcohol-based markers? Why are they so dang expensive? Are they really worth it? Intro to Alcohol Markers will demystify the medium for you! A set of 12 markers and paper pad ($75 value!) are included with the class! 🍊

Sunday, September 28, 7:15 PM: Join us after hours for Riff Raff League! Process current events, focus your energy, and figure out what you and your neighbours can do about... at least one of the many things happening. 😩

BINARY by Mark Haven Britt, Josef Sison, and Steven Yu is a freshly Kickstartered kaiju superhero adventure in a fun, oversized book!

BINARY is a sci-fi monster fight comic set in a myth-soaked, post-war world of industrial ruin and creeping magic. In this debut issue, two haunted soldiers, Omiros and Kos, search for a rare ingredient to save Kos’s life. Their quest leads them into a decaying bridge, where a rhino-like monster has nested... and a divine, octopus-like beast believes it has been sent to destroy it. What follows is a brutal, beautiful monster brawl wrapped in themes of redemption, fate, and survival.

Think Dune meets Thundercats: high-concept, high-emotion, and high-impact.

Monday, September 29, 5:00 PM: Celebrate the damp, woody smell of fall by painting some mushrooms and learn more about gouache as a medium while you're at it, at Paint a Gouache-shroom! 🍄

Tuesday, September 30, 5:00 PM: Dream of printing your own patterns onto fabrics, wrapping paper, or even wallpaper? Just want to make a fun repeating background for your phone, desktop, or website? Learn how to create Repeating Patterns in Procreate! 🔁

Wednesday, October 1, 6:00 PM: Grab your needles and fibers and come hang out at Stitch n' Bitch, our free monthly fiber arts meetup! Get some knitting or crocheting done, make progress on that embroidery project, or get started on something new! 🧵 FREE MEETUP.

Thursday, October 2, 5:00 PM: Procreate is the most powerful art-making tool on iPad, but it can be intimidating to get started! Intro to Procreate is the in-person infodump that will give you everything you need, plus hands on guidance you can't replicate with a YouTube tutorial! 👐

Friday, October 3, 5:30 PM: Skulls are the foundation of many forms, and they're intrinsically spooky to boot! Join us at Draw Skulls! to draw from real skulls of various sorts, learn about different parts of skull anatomy, and more! 💀

Saturday, October 4, 10:00 AM: This month's Zine Crash Course will focus on comics! Not all comics are zines, and not all zines are comics, but the middle Venn diagram slice is pretty big! Explore storytelling via comics and learn how your topic might benefit from comics as a format in your next zine! 📖

Saturday, October 4, 1:00 PM: October's Book Binding Workshop is SOLD OUT and November's has TWO SPOTS LEFT. You really gotta plan ahead for this class! 📚

Saturday, October 4, 5:00 PM: Create an environment for some lil guys when you Craft a Mini World With Cloche Dioramas! Learn diorama basics, make use of a variety of materials, and see a world come to life! 🌲

Sunday, October 5, 10:00 PM: Love the handlettered look, but not the hand cramps? Turn your handwriting into a digital font at Make Fonts in Procreate! 🔠

Sunday, October 5, 1:00 PM: This month's Color Theory for Artists will focus on acrylic paints! What makes up the color in acrylics? How do they mix together? How DON'T they mix together? Chemistry and art come together in this practical class! 🔴🔵🟡

Sunday, October 5, 4:00 PM: It's SPIDERS this month at Gouache Critters! Everyone's (least?) favourite fall nemesis! Appease the spiders by painting one, and maybe they will get out of your house and stop spinning webs directly outside your front door? No guarantees, but maybe it will work!! 🕷️

Sunday, October 7:15 PM: The news doesn't stop coming, so neither do we. Join us at Riff Raff League to process the politics together and to channel some collective energy into ways we can resist and make a difference. ✊ FREE MEETUP.