Welcome to Illustrating Children's Books (and beyond!)

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Looking to tailor your artwork to the children's book market? Marco will take you through every skill and step you need to take, using examples from real-life, published projects. He'll also create artwork from beginning to end, demonstrating how he starts with an author's manuscript and goes through the many stages of producing illustrations for the final book. Along the way there will be valuable insights as to how to make your work stand out for the children's book industry ... and beyond!

The class is structured into three chapters, as follows:

CHAPTER 1: PROJECT TOURS
- Referencing examples from actual modern-day professional projects
- Understanding how to work with a publisher's manuscript, formatting and margins
- Understanding how kids interact with illustration
- Art and books for different age groups
- Tips on sketching out various page options for clients and publishers
- Maximizing visual storytelling in the medium of children's books
- Composing a page for the most appeal
- Understanding the print jargon involved in the book publishing industry

CHAPTER 2: DRAWING CHARACTERS
- What elements makes a character feel unique?
- Character posing and gesture drawing fundamentals
- Fundamentals of form and how to make your work look dimensional
- Fundamentals of shape and how to pull a design together
- Facial expressions
- Examples from actual professional assignments

CHAPTER 3: BACKGROUNDS & COLOR
- My model of understanding color temperature: warm vs. cool color relationships
- The fundamentals of rendering light and shadow I use in every painting I do
- Breaking down local color, and how light and shadow plays into it
- Using freehand perspective for stylized (but believable) depth
- Organic perspective for outdoor/nature scenes
- Controlling value for clear, readable paintings
- Using the digital environment to produce final artwork
- Painting a character
- Painting rough color passes of a scene to search for moods and ideas to present to a client
- Using layers, brushes, effects, and more
- Painting a final, print-ready illustration
- Formatting the final illustration with proper bleeds, correct DPI and resolution
- CMYK conversion tips

ALSO: Two bonus interviews!
- A multi-time published children's book author
- A professional, active children's book art director

Digital brushpack included (ABR format)

Marco has illustrated children's books for companies big and small: Walt Disney Publishing, Sleeping Bear Press, Harper Collins, and more. His experience in the industry ranges from primary readers to various grade levels. This gives him a wide perspective from which to teach this class, and he focuses on the principles and tools that are an indispensable part of the job.

Dasha Shulyanskaya

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