Courses
Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks!
An online course on illustrating children’s books,Make Your Splashes – Make Your Marks! shows you how to draw nearly anything, unlock beautiful design and color in your art and what to do, step by step when you land that assignment to illustrate a story for a book, magazine or digital product.
Four subject areas divide up the 22 core lessons of the course: Your drawing design, color, painting and promoting your work.
Course includes monthly group critiques of student illustration art, a supportive online community and resource sharing site and monthly video interviews with successful children’s book artists.
The course offers a new “tech track” for artists interested in the digital publishing marketplace, including e-books and interactive book apps for the iPad, iPad Touch and smart phones.
Check out the new Study Team enrollment option where students can partner on tuition for better synergy and big savings.
Read more Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks!
If you prefer your educational enrichment a la carte:
Dynamic Drawing and Design
The first half of the Marks and Splashes course covers every step of creating the “blueprint” for your painting or illustration. You’ll learn how to “seed” a superior composition with a gesture thumbnail sketch and create suspense-building storyboards.
Sessions cover how to find and use picture reference, set your story’s “puppet stages” with convincing perspective and compose dynamic scenes with multiple figures in action.
You’ll discover how to build your drawing, from scribbled thumbnail to finished outline that you’ll transfer to your painting surface.
Youi’ll see how to put together that most that most important selling tool for a picture book author-illustrator — a book dummy or partial dummy to send to a children’s book agent or editor.
Dynamic Drawing and Design also includes a one year membership in the Marks and Splashes online community and resource sharing site.
See more on Dynamic Drawing and Design.
Dauntless Design
Videos and a packed PDF lesson show you how to make magnetic pictures with one big, mysterious idea.
Your pictures at the very least must hold and fascinate the eye. Dauntless Design: Enchanting the Rectangle (Session #12 from the Marks and Splashes course) teaches you how to do exactly that with a little simple geometry. In a way that you’ll remember, Session # 12 brings home the single key of design that will improve your drawing and painting automatically from now on.
Power Color
The second module of Make Your Marks; Make Your Splashes! teaches how to unlock beautiful color in your paintings almost automatically. Three entertaining sessions provide a deeper understanding of aesthetic color for all painters. You’ll know how to set up a “perfect palette” for every scene, so your colors work in a rich fusion of harmony and dramatic tension.
Although the Power Color system can apply to any painting medium, including digital, the module also provides a superb introduction to watercolor painting.
Coming Soon: Painting Pretty and Painting “Perfect”
Painting “Perfect” combines modules # 2 (Power Color) and #3 (Painting Pretty) from the Marks and Splashes course.
Bare Bones Intro to Photoshop
This 15 minute instructional video by abstract painter Steve Connor starts you using layers, “painting” with the brush tool, and making shapes — no matter which version of the software you have.
Enjoy the free Bare Bones Intro to Photoshop.
Please take Steve’s Learning Digital Media survey here.
