Develop your artistic confidence here

Illustration by Mark Mitchell from The Trail North  by Charlotte Baker Montgomery (Eakin Press)

Congratulations!
You’ve landed on a blog and an education-community site intended for you. 

You won’t find another site quite like this. You’ll find art lessons here. But they’re more than art lessons — more like revelations. You’ll find design and drawing tips, too. But they’re more than tips. They’re more like keys to easily tackle most picture-making challenges that you will face. 

You’ll learn how to draw without “learning how to draw.” What I mean to say is: tedium has no place on this blog or in this curriculum –  only discovery.

Anyone can learn to draw, paint and illustrate expressively. a high enough interest level, the right information and a little bit of ”right practice” (but not tedious practice.)  You’ll get these here.

This blog supports Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks: A power home study course on creating effective illustrations for children’s books, magazines and other media.  Both here and in the year-long online course, you’ll find painting instruction  — but a unique kind that can free you as it encourages and dares you to explore several painting mediums and methods. 

You’ll discover how to grow your illustration from a thumbnail “seed” to a living-breathing, full-sized sketch —  and ”make a scene, fusing the skills of the draftsman with the cunning (artistically speaking) of the storyteller.  

In frequent interviews you’ll meet successful children’s book illustrators and see how they work.  They might share some of their best trade secrets with you. 

You’ll find news roundups of the field,  mini-lessons by guest artist-instructors, and a wonderful exposure to the books, blogs and projects of your fellow illustrators. You’ll find a growing online community, support group and casual clearing house for a vast array of resources and information. And gradually you’ll be able to enter the dialogue of illustrators, graphic designers, art directors, editors, agents, writers, teachers and librarians and others who love the artistry of children’s books.  

As enrolled student-members, you’ll have access to the year-long online course, Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks: A Power Course in Creating Effective Illustrations for Children’s Books, Magazines and Other Media, based on a popular class honed overmany years in the studio classrooms of the Austin Museum of Art Art School. 

You’ll acquire new skills and sophisticated knowledge that could save you years of  “conventional art study”, frustration/confusion and costly mis-steps. 

You’ll love this journey. You’ll have fun. In the strange, quiet way that creators have fun. And you will  grow.  Maybe a lot.

So bookmark this site. Keep coming back to it. You’ve found a good community for you — but it is partly a gated community.  To enroll as a student-member and have access to the in-depth content and the core training,  e-mail mark@markgmitchell.com.

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Children’s book Author-illustrator Mark G. Mitchell (www.markgmitchell.com) hosts How to Be a Children’s Book Illustrator.   Download his award-winning book Raising La Belle, about the recovery of a 312 year old shipwreck — for free at http://shipwreck-book.weebly.com.

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