Digital Tools for Graphic Novelists: Small-group class in Photoshop and InDesign

Adobe can do an astonishing amount—and it can also be astonishingly confusing. This course focuses on the tools and workflows that are actually useful for making comics, graphic novels, illustrated books, and other visual storytelling projects.

Over eight weekly 90-minute sessions, we’ll spend four weeks in Photoshop and four weeks in InDesign. In Photoshop, we’ll work with file setup, resolution, layers, scanned or photographed artwork, selections and masks, color, brushes, blending modes, texture, adjustments, and preparing finished artwork for layout. In InDesign, we’ll build documents, work with trim size, margins and bleeds, place and manage images, create and style text, use parent pages and layers, and prepare files for print or digital publication.

You can work with your own comic pages, illustrations, photographs, or other image files—you do not need to create new artwork specifically for the class. Writers and editors are very welcome, too; projects might include book pages, bookplates, promotional materials, or other image-and-text layouts.

This is a hands-on course. I’ll demonstrate a skill, then you’ll try it yourself using your own project whenever possible. Because the group is limited to five participants, we’ll also have room each week for questions, screen sharing, individual troubleshooting, and the inevitable “Why on earth is Adobe doing THAT?” moment.

8 weekly 90-minute synchronous sessions
Mondays, Oct. 19–Dec. 7, 2026
4:30–6:00 PM Ireland/UK
11:30 AM–1:00 PM Eastern
10:30 AM–12:00 PM Central
8:30–10:00 AM Pacific

Oct. 26 only: class meets one hour earlier in Europe (3:30–5:00 PM Ireland/UK) to keep U.S. times consistent during the daylight-saving transition.

Maximum 5 participants
$520