Courtesy of the ASIFA - Hollywood Animation Archives: Illustrator Gustaf Tenggren

This fun, practical unique online class will provide you with the basics of illustrating for children’s books, magazines and other media for children, and will help you with all of your art-making from now on.

Those editors and art directors at children’s book publishing houses want to see samples of your color work.  So expect to complete some finished, full color pieces for your story. You can upload your best piece from the course to this site, if you wish. 

You’ll learn all the steps in preparing thumbnails, a book “dummy” and a submission package for an editor and/or art director at a publishing house. 

You’ll discover how to use visual references, transfer sketches to a painting surface and work in an assured way with color. Learn the right methods for submitting your final art (after you land that book illustration contract!) and how to effectively market yourself and your work for future assignments. 

More about the course

You’ll receive a hands-on  introduction to children’s book and magazine illustration by Mark Mitchell, an award-winning children’s book author-illustrator.

You’ll gain an exceptional understanding of the children’s book market and how to proceed with any book or magazine illustration project.

You will learn to prepare thumbnail sketches, storyboards and a book “dummy,” and find the reference you need to help you to draw confidently. 

The course will provide you with a real understanding of picture and page design, visual perspective, artistic anatomy and watercolor technique.   You’ll also find insights on working with editors and art directors and pointers for marketing yourself and your work in the intensely competitive field of children’s media. 

As you work through the lessons, you’ll find your individual style emerging as you start to develop artistic confidence.

For more information on the course, write Mark at mark@howtobeachildrensbookillustrator.com — or leave your comment on the ASK survey at this link.

Animation Archive Little Night, written and illustrated by Yuyi Morales, published by Roaring Book Press - Holtzbrinck (designed by Jennifer Browne) won the Golden Kite Award for best picture book illustration.
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April’s The Artist’s Magazine (F+W Publications) features an interview with Jan Brett (33 million books in print and still going strong.)

Funny, I was reading The Mitten to my three year old-granddaughter just the other night and we were both enjoying this book very much.

Brett’s only formal art training came from museum art classes when she was young.

She works with a very dry (watercolor) brush technique, “almost like a colored pencil,” she tells interviewer Paula Theotocus.

Loved as much by booksellers and librarians as by children, she travels the world researching the locales of the stories she works on, accompanied by her husband, Joe Hearne, who is also her business manager and webmaster.
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Cynsations, the blog of teen and children’s author Cynthia Leitich-Smith  featured interviews with children’s book industry folks who spoke at the March 29-30  SCBWI Bologna Conference 2008 in connection with the Bologna Book Fair.

Cynsations guest writer Anita Loughrey spoke with Caldecott winning illustrator Paul O Zelinksy, French comic author-illustrator Emmanuel Guibert and Harper Collins executive art director Martha Rago.

For Loughrey’s question, “What makes an artists illustrations stand out for you?” Rago had an interesting answer:

“I would not underestimate technical skills, which are very, very important: anatomy, composition, and perspective, good use of color and line, and effective use of materials,” she said.

“But I am always looking for someone who has not just the technical skills but a distinct individual style, a clear voice and images that suggest narrative through context,emotional tone, and the way they relate sequentially.” It’s not often you get to peek inside the mind of an art director at a major children’s publishing house. Read the full interview with Martha Rago here.

Author-illustrator Sarah Ackerley signs “Patrick the Somnambulist” (Blooming Tree Press) for a young fan at Bookpeople. 
The prose is just so beguiling that I want to quote the whole thing — word for word — the whole picture book up here on the blog. 

The book would be Patrick the Somnambulist, published by Blooming Tree Press.

The author-illustrator would be Sarah Ackerley, a member of our Austin, Texas  SCBWI group (who recently moved with her husband to San Francisco.)

It’s about a normal penguin child – normal except for one thing: He gets into crazy  situations in the middle of the night.

His parents take him to a doctor who assesses his problem: somnambulism. “a fancy word for sleepwalking,” we are told.  With the diagnosis comes acceptance and with acceptance comes confidence, and — well, I’ve already given away too much.  Oh, well with confidence …let’s just say you too could end up on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

Inspiration came from Sarah’s own husband who will sometimes do silly things while asleep, like look for his ‘missing wallet’ in the blender, or prepare a bowl of cereal for himself. 

“Loving Your Label”  was the headline of a recent Canadian review podcast about Sarah’s book. Husband and wife/parent team Mark and Andrea  devote an entire six minute episode to ”Patrick the Somnambulist” on Just One More Book :(A podcast about the childrens books we love and why we love them, recorded in our favorite coffee shop) .  “It’s an instant hit with everyone in the family,” exclaims Mark.

Andrea exults how a label and the understanding that comes with it can sometimes free a self. “It’s like I’m an introvert. I’m acting freaky because I’m an introvert,” she says.

You can listen to their fun conversation here.

Original sketch that inspired the story of Patrick

While making ready to move from Texas to the S.F. Bay area,  Sarah graciously conceded to an interview by How to be a children’s book illustrator.

“The story started with a sketch,” she says. “The way I write is I usually have a mental image of the funniest page where it all grows from.”

You can see that sketch above. The parents discover the sleep-walking Patrick standing in the bathroom, a roll of toilet paper over one arm, a toothbrush in his hand, and a toilet plunger stuck on top of his head.

“The parents are looking up like he’s weird, and the whole story absolutely did unfold around that image,” Sarah says. “It took me like an hour to write. I was seeing the pictures as I wrote.  The words kind of poured out like I had the complete story. Then I just went back and crossed out the weaker lines.”

Drawing a Patrick character that satisfied her took a little longer. “I have all kind of images for him. It’s pretty funny to see where he started and where he wound up. He looked really bad for a while. He started out looking like a squash.

“I checked out an enormous stack of books on penguins and I started drawing them from all angles. I l looked at no cartoons, because I wanted him to look like a real penguin. HIs lack of personality is almost the point – I wanted to capture his animal ‘penguineness.’”

Sarah wanted Patrick to look more like a penguin than a cartoon penguin and to not have a cartoony 'personality.'

Sarah had not worked in watercolor before Patrick.  But she knew a thing or two about the art making process. She’d earned a BFA at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in studio art. (She later finished an M.A. in Elementary Education.) 

She’d never illustrated a book. ”I thought every picture book was done in watercolor. That was the medium that illustrators used,” she says.

With a little guidance from a $5 watercolor ‘how to’ book, “I did these tiny, tiny images the size of my fist.. on cheap watercolor paper with blocks of typewritten text glued in…I scanned it in at Walgreens and had it bound with a spiral binder at Kinko’s Copies.”

She brought her creation to an Austin SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) picture book dummy-making demonstration given by artist Regan Johnson. 

Regan, who had just taken the job of art director for Austin-based publisher Blooming Tree Press, worked with Sarah to come up with a second, larger more professional dummy.

“I wasn’t straight up accepted,” Sarah says, “But it was, ‘Can you develop this a little further and we’ll talk?’”

"Patrick the Somnambulist" defining moment -- once a sketch, now a finished watercolor painting for the inside of the book.

For her finished art Sarah used professional grade Grumbacher watercolor tube paints. On 140 lb. cold pressed watercolor paper she painted  over outlines she’d made with a Calligraphy pen. The pen lines smeared a little because the ink was not waterproof, “but I kind of liked the results,” she says.

“I had a lot of troubleshooting problems that I solved in a round-about-way. But it worked out. Making the book was how I taught myself watercolor.”

Sarah’s busy on a number of great new projects, including a picture book about a delightful owl character  with…well, let’s just say a different sleep disorder. 

See Sarah’s blog, and her website,  Sarah Ackerley Illustration.   

Writer Mark Mitchell teachers a children’s book illustration class at the  Austin Museum of Art Art School at 3809 West 35th Street, Austin, Texas 78703.  He’ll  teach a special weekend watercolor workshop , “Watercolor for Children’s Book illustration” August 9 -10.  For more information on any of the dozens of AMOA summer art classes (for adults or children) call the Art School at (512) 323-6380 or visit the AMOA  website. 

To receive eight free lessons in a new online course on children’s book illustration  that Mark has started teaching, go to this ASK survey page and answer the survey question you see.

Awesome Austin Writers Workshop in session (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith)

A mega-critique of 26 children’s and YA published and soon-to-be-published authors, the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop  ended Sunday, June 29, and everyone drove home in shock.  Shock because it was over and had gone so well and we realized  that we weren’t coming back to hang out with each other again the next day.

The workshop took place in the 1920s-vintage Austin, Texas home of authors Greg and Cynthia Leitich Smith.

Cynthia, who teaches in the children’s and young adult writing MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts thought up and organized the event with help from her author-attorney husband, Greg and other friends from the Austin chapter of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.)  

For three days she led the critiques in a tour de force of quick wit, good fun, practical erudition, zinging (as opposed to stinging) professional insight and Kansas Pioneer Woman stamina. 

Months before we’d been asked to submit up to ten pages of our works in progress. These were the beginnings of picture books, parts of YA novels and sci-fantasy chapter books, poems and nonfiction stories. Each writer got 40-45 minutes of vociferous attention from the group, moderated by Cynthia. 

Liz Scanlon, Alison Dellenbaugh, Erin Edwards and Phillip Yates get their papers in order. April Lurie is in the background. (Photo courtesy of Cynthia Leitich Smith.)

It’s an odd sensation to be on the receiving end of so much focus – 26 bright minds reacting to your prose or verse, while you’re not allowed to talk back. It feels like a surgical procedure is being done – a double cataract removal. 

Like the other dazed & AAWW’ed patients after their operations, I got my copies back scribbled with thoughts, kudos, suggestions for fixes, often accompanied by typed notes. We clutched our precious stacks like they were our medical charts and we were on our gurneys in the recovery room.

Since I was one of two illustrators present, I was invited to pass around a couple of sketches to accompany my picture book offering – for additional AAWW-some scrutiny.

There was a lot of sharing, bonding, helping and a lot of eating going on.  Our graceful “pages” (fellow SCBWI’ers)  Donna Bratton and Carmen Oliver kept us supplied with coffee, scrambled egg kolaches, chocolates, juice and jokes (bad pun jokes — relentless pantomiming on the theme ”turning pages”,  ”flipping pages.” At one point they donned tunics with labels: ”Page #1″ and “Page #2.”)

The founder and first regional adviser of our Austin SCBWI chapter, Meredith Davis was there, along with our current RA Tim Crow and former RA Julie Lake and our 90 year old member Betty X. Davis, who frequently outpaces us.  Participant Gene Brenek wrote later, ”These relationships have been years in the making.” It was true and probably contributed to all the magic we felt around us. Still, not  everyone present was an Awesome Austin writer. You see, Awesome writer Varsha Bajaj joined us from the Houston SCBWI chapter. She became one of us quickly, though.

Taking time out from their paginations, Donna Bratton(left) and Carmen Oliver (right) visit with author Lindsey Lane at the Saturday night party at author Helen Hemphill's home. (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith.)

We enjoyed a relaxing Saturday night party in the lovely loft residence of YA author Helen Hemphill and her husband Neil. Children’s writers settled right in to flowing wine, a spectacular catered supper and twinkling night views of the downtown.

Sunday around lunchtime everyone drove home in shock, as I’ve explained above. Many, after recovering somewhat, went straight to blogging about their experience, which is why the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop is all over the Internet today, as it should be.

Here are some of the blogposts::

Jo Whittemore, Julie Lake, Liz Scanlon and Betty Davis prepare for the next critique round. (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith)

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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