Make Your Splashes – Make Your Marks!
The online Make Your Splashes – Make Your Marks! course is for you if you’re interested in creating fine illustrations for children’s stories. Here are the empowering tips and supportive online community you’ve been looking for. Discover how to improve your drawing and painting and market yourself as a children’s book artist.
In addition to 23 core sessions, the course offers monthly, live online group critique sessions with author-illustrator Mark Mitchell and your talented student colleagues. Enjoy Mark’s in-depth video interviews with professional children’s book illustrators in their studios and “tech track” bonus webinars that explore the emerging world of digital children’s books and story apps. See more on Make Your Splashes- Make Your Marks!
Check out these stand-alone modules and lessons if you prefer your educational enrichment à la carte, check out the following pull-out modules from the main course:
Dynamic Drawing
The first half of the Marks and Splashes course covers all the steps you need to know to create your picture “blueprints” that you’ll be painting for your book. You’ll learn how to plant the seeds for exciting compositions with gestural thumbnails and create flowing thumbnail storyboards.
Discover ways to create convincing figures, characters and scenes with multiple figures in action and how to build your story “stage sets” with comfortable perspective.
See up close how to enlarge your thumbnail sketches into full-scale drawings that you can easily transfer to your painting surface. Understand how to craft an irresistible dummy for your picture book proposal to attract a children’s book agent and/or editor. See more on Dynamic Drawing and Design.
Dauntless Design
Video tutorial, detailed PDF and classroom studio lecture show you how to cast a “lucky spell” over your pictures, greatly improving your compositions with one simple, almost mystical “big idea” discovered by artists and architects in ancient times.
Even the least of your pieces should hold and fascinate the eye. This session from the Marks and Splashes shows you how to do that easily and quickly — almost as if by magic. Read more about Dauntless Design.
Power Color
The second module of Make Your Marks; Make Your Splashes! shows how to unlock beautiful color in your paintings nearly every time and shave away hours from your process. Eliminate your color worries forever.
Three playful sessions offer a deep understanding of aesthetic color for painters. Learn to set up a “perfect palette” for each scene you illustrate, so that your colors actually work in a satisfying fusion of opposites. Learn to work confidently and professionally with your pigments and turn your paintings into successful color poems.
The Power Color system applies to most painting medium, including digital. It’s also an empowering introduction to watercolor painting technique. See more on Power Color.
Bare Bones Intro to Photoshop
This free video tutorial by abstract painter and Adobe-certified instructor Steve Connor gets you started using layers, “painting” with the brush tool and making shapes — no matter which version of Photoshop you have. Enjoy Bare Bones Intro to Photoshop.
Watch Steve’s second free 90 minute video workshop, Vector and Paint: Intro to Photoshop Art Making, Take his survey about what you’re interested in learning for your digital art-making, Learning Digital Media.
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How To Be A Children's Book Illustrator 