Thank you for visiting our website! We offer rare and hard-to-find courses that focus on helping creative, talented and driven artists start down the path toward a career in the comic book, movie and video game industries. Whether you wish to pursue a future working for the top companies, or to create your own characters, worlds, or intellectual properties for fun or profit, we can teach you the skills to set you on your way.

For our inaugural year, we will be offering a limited number of courses and summer art camps at discounted prices as we get a feel for what the Cleveland creative community looks like. Those courses have a maximum of ten students each and are likely to fill up fast. The adult classes will be offered only once each in 2024, though there will be some repetition with many of the summer camps for middle- and high school students.

This school is modeled after and created by the founder of the award-winning Denver Entertainment Art & Design Academy, which was modeled after the amazing Art Academy of Los Angeles. We are here to give creative individuals living in Cleveland a taste of a Los Angeles entertainment art education at a fraction of the cost, and without having to move to Los Angeles.

The award-winning Denver Entertainment Art & Design Academy has moved to Cleveland!

One of our larger goals is to strengthen the Cleveland creative art scene, becoming a focal point for people to come together, meet others with similar interests, and perhaps collaborate on local comic book, movie or video game projects.

While we will have limited courses in 2024, we will happily expand our offerings as our student base grows. We will also be seeing out talented local professionals in the various creative industries to expand our catalog of courses. As students complete our introductory courses, we will add intermediate and advanced levels to supercharge their portfolios, creations, ideas and projects.

When possible, we will look to bring in great artists, teachers, creators and art directors to talk to students about their areas of expertise. If demand exists, we will consider offering a series of FX makeup classes in September and October for those who love Halloween and want to take their game to the next level.

Please take a look at our list of courses here, and if you wish to stay informed of all the events, visitors, workshops, projects and additions, join our mailing list here. We won't bombard you with spam, just let you know the fun things coming down the road. You can find out how to reach us here.

About Our Owner/Lead Instructor

Zak Hennessey owned a comic book publishing company in his early 20's, Lodestone Publishing. He attended the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design and the Art Academy of Los Angeles. The latter was exactly what he needed to get into the entertainment industry as an artist.

He provided art and design work for Disney, Showtime, Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount, FOX, and others. He later returned to the Art Academy as a teacher, creating a Comic Book curriculum in 2005. In 2012 he opened the Denver Entertainment Art & Design Academy (D.E.A.D. Academy), the kind of school he had wished existed when he was getting out of high school, to bring a Los Angeles creative education to Denver.

Now he has opened the Creative Forge Academy in Cleveland, to help the next generation of creative artists gain the skills to get into the comic book, manga, movie, and video game art industries.

Learn about the Creative Forge Academy!