LAMY x Kunstpalast

The event kicked off with Daria Rychkova, an illustrator with an international portfolio who has been working in Germany for 15 years. She works for renowned brands such as Dior and Louis Vuitton and illustrates children's books. In Kickstart Your Creativity, she showed the young participants how to creatively process their own everyday lives with practical exercises.

In the Typography and Patterns workshop, participants created a large-scale collaborative work under the guidance of Guido de Boer. The Dutch artist and lecturer at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague led participants through the creative process in this full-day workshop – from the initial sketch to the final composition, which was displayed as a permanent mural in the Palast Studio for several months.

From Sketch to Soul: Character Design in Comics brought together comic book expertise from Germany and Canada. William Ahland, an up-and-coming young comic book artist from Düsseldorf, led the session on site. Derek Laufman, an internationally recognised professional who has been working as a comic artist and illustrator for Marvel, Warner Brothers and Disney projects for two decades, joined digitally. Together, they showed how characters come to life through line, colour and storytelling – and facilitated a hybrid exchange between artists on two continents, the audience at Palast Studio and the community connected live online.

During the Urban Sketching session led by Nima Dibazar, who also works as an architect, participants created sketches of urban scenes in the open air. With over twenty years of experience in cities such as London, Manchester and Dubai, he demonstrated how urban spaces can be perceived as open sketchbooks full of visual stories.

In the workshop From Drawing to Crank Cinema, Angela González and Matthias Luthardt, director and screenwriter, worked with participants on handmade film sequences. Using ink, watercolours and coloured pencils, they created short stories, moving shapes and loops.

Takumi Ogata, graphic designer and illustrator, known for his ‘Japanese retro style’, led the workshop Animal sketches with a ballpoint pen: from nature studies to fantasy creatures. Using reference images as a starting point, the participants developed imaginative hybrid creatures that combine reality and fantasy.