Marks and Splashes!

The 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 you’ve sought to improve your drawing and painting and market yourself as a children’s book artist.

In addition to the core training ions the course offers monthly online (live) group critique sessions with Mark Mitchell and the Wiggio Children’s Book Illustration Group, a supportive online learning community and resource sharing site for Marks and Splashes students.

Learn from Mark’s video interviews with professional children’s book artists and other online opportunities that explore digital art-making tools and publishing — e-books and story apps. Read more about Make Your Splashes – Make Your Marks!

Dare to Draw

If you prefer your educational enrichment à la carte, check out the following pull-out modules. This one is the first half of the course, covering the steps you need to know to create your picture “blueprints” that you’ll paint for your book. You’ll discover how to plant the seeds for exciting compositions with gestural thumbnails and create flowing thumbnail storyboards.

The module also shows you how conjur convincing figures, characters and scenes with multiple figures in action and how to build your story “stage sets” with a comfortable mastery of perspective. See how to “blow up” your thumbnail sketches into the full-scale drawings that you’ll transfer to your painting surface and how to build an appealing dummy for your picture book proposal to attract a children’s book agent and/or editor. See more about Dare to Draw.

Dauntless Design

Video tutorial, detailed PDF and classroom studio lecture show you how to cast a “lucky spell” over your pictures, improving your compositions with a single, simple, almost mystical “big idea” that was perceived by artists and architects in ancient times.

The first job of every piece you create should be to hold and fascinate the eye. This pull-out session from the Marks and Splashes course shows you how to do that easily and instantly using this “big idea.” Read more about Dauntless Design.

Power Color

The second module of Make Your Marks; Make Your Splashes! reveals how to unlock beautiful color in your paintings nearly every time and shave away hours of labor and frustration from your painting process. Eliminate your color worries forever with these few ideas.

These three playful sessions offer a deep understanding of color for painters. Discover how to set up a “perfect palette” for each of your paintings and illustrations. You’ll see how to work confidently and professionally with your pigments and turn each of your paintings into a successful “color poem.” The Power Color system applies to most painting mediums, including digital mediums. The module is also an empowering introduction to watercolor painting technique. See more.

B are 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. Keep up with more resources, links and news by “liking” our Facebook page.

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