I'm Teaching a Workshop at the Ozark Media Arts Festival on October 7 in Downtown Springdale, AR

On October 7, 2026, I’m leading a two-part workshop at the Ozark Media Arts Festival (OMAF) for high school media and arts students from across Northwest Arkansas.

Founded in 2011, OMAF has built a 16-year track record of connecting Midwest youth to digital media careers, regularly bringing over 500 middle and high school students into downtown Springdale to showcase their work, compete, and learn from working professionals.

Growing up, my sketchbooks were full of imaginative characters, but the adults and business professionals I respected all warned me that art wasn’t something you could actually make a career out of. They weren’t entirely wrong... art is a brutal, challenging craft to build a successful career from. To be fair, at that time in my life, I didn’t know a single working artist who could prove otherwise, and the internet wasn’t filled with tutorials and inspirational content creators like it is today. Back then, it was mostly dial tones and instant messaging. 😆

What I really needed was a blueprint: a clear way to take my own work and build an independent practice without waiting for permission or credentials.

So I built the workshop I would have wanted to attend back in high school, one that would have helped me establish skills I can use and build a vision for the future.

Part One: A Drawing That Moves and Talks

The first half is a live demonstration of my art process and rigging programs I built and use to create a moving character.

In the demo I’ll take one of my hand-drawn characters, showcase a working character rig from the design, and animate it live in the room. Then I’ll add some dialogue and animate the mouth. A figure that started on paper becomes a character that walks, blinks, and speaks on screen in front of everyone, using software I engineered through AI-assisted development.

If the rig breaks or has setup challenges, they watch me troubleshoot and fix it, which is an important part of the process.

Part Two: What To Do Next

The second half covers what is most important: how to turn raw creation into a sustainable practice in your career.

In the workshop, I will cover:

• Make: Focus on the work first.

• Anchor: Give your art a home you own.

• Play: Let people interact with your work, not just look at it.

• Spread: Construct systems that help your creations travel.

• Belong: Build the room where your community gathers.

That’s the BizarreBeasts story in five words, and it’s the framework I had to figure out through years of trial and error, and which is still evolving today.

Every student who attends the workshop will leave with two concrete tools on paper: a Rig Sheet for initially prepping their own characters for animation, and a one-page Blueprint they can take away and use for building their own creative practice.

On the AI Question

I’ll inevitably get asked about AI, so here it is plainly:

I don’t have an engineering background, and I have spent thousands of hours experimenting and learning to develop code with AI as a working partner and co-pilot, building miniapps, original games, and the custom animation software I use every day.

My AI assistant, Anthropic’s Claude agent, helps me run those tools and draft repetitive tasks, such as motion timing, under my direction to accelerate composition and scale my work.

However, the artwork never comes from a prompt or is generated. I hand-illustrate all of the characters, props, and environments in the BizarreBeasts universe.

The students attending the workshop will no doubt encounter moments in their careers when navigating the intersection of creative work and AI technologies, so it’s better to show them what a hybrid workflow of human-AI collaboration looks like, without outsourcing human creativity or thought.

Event Details

The Ozark Media Arts Festival runs October 6–7, 2026 in downtown Springdale, Arkansas.

I will be providing a link for more info and additional resources at the workshop for students who want to dive deeper and take these lessons from the workshop and apply them.

But of course, no prep is required to attend the workshop. Just show up.

Also Happening This Fall

Our Art 2026 Exhibition: My animated piece All Cooped Up will be running in Fayetteville at the Alexander Gallery at Porter Art Warehouse (presented by Walton Arts Center) from September 25 through December 20.