Alex Perkins

Focus on drawing and illustration as exciting tools for organizing thoughts, experiences, and images. Develop and strengthen fundamental skills as you work with line, volume, space, form, and palette and investigate a range of traditional and contemporary materials such as charcoal, graphite, pen and ink, and digital illustration. Virtual visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and discussion of practicing artists and illustrators supplement the studio experience. This course is recommended for both beginners and those wanting to improve and develop their current skills and ideas.

This course emphasizes the artist's role in children's picture book illustration and focuses on the world of visual storytelling. Through demonstrations and in-class assignments, students working at a variety of skill levels explore materials and techniques used to create children's book illustrations; images that guide children into a whole new imaginative universe through a sequence of memorable visual images. Creating book dummies to organize their ideas, students learn to balance text and image on the page. Students should have basic drawing skills.