Mixed Media Illustration

Create your own narrative illustrations. Looking to paintings, pop culture, and tarot cards for inspiration, practice simplifying and exaggerating human anatomy to create unique character designs and captivating compositions. Draw creatures and landscapes rich in mythical power and visual interest, and learn to leverage your creativity as you create an original series of illustrations with colored pencils, ink, and watercolor. Whether you prefer mythic fantasy, surrealism, or whimsy, this is a dynamic class for those of all skill levels hoping to explore the art of illustration and let their imaginations run wild.

• Week 1: Design your characters through the creation of simple silhouettes. Use color and proportion to express personality and attitude while exploring simplified forms in watercolor. Aim for distinctive proportions and consider which stylistic additions will elevate each character’s icon status.
• Week 2: Give your characters a shared task and an environment in which they will complete it. Learn how to make this visually legible, and decide upon the tone of your narrative: is it a lighthearted folktale, a heroic adventure, or a moody mystery?
• Week 3: Build tension through setting: create a dynamic environment that challenges your characters. Start with a small thumbnail sketch, and draw from our library of reference photos (or use your own) to bring it to life. Incorporate your characters within their environment, and depict their interactions with what surrounds them.
• Week 4: Confront scale and power as you introduce a giant presence. Study sense of scale through the illustration of an enormous being. Explore composition, perspective, and emotional contrast as your characters face, evade, or engage with it.
• Week 5: Depict crisis and vulnerability as one character is injured or tested, either physically or emotionally. Convey emotion, consequence, and resilience through gesture, expression, honing your skills in visual storytelling.
• Week 6: Finish with transformation. Portray metamorphosis or renewal on a physical, emotional, or spiritual level as your characters or their world evolve, closing the journey with a sense of resolution and change. We will conclude our time together with a reflection on our work and a conversation about what we have learned.

Expand your art-making skills through guided, step-by-step instruction with expert teaching artists. Over multiple weeks, you will learn alongside other creative adults and delve deeply into the artistic process, explore new techniques, and build your practice.

This is an intermediate-level Studio Class. The curriculum and instruction are intended for adults with some prior experience. While all motivated learners are welcome, students with a foundational understanding of these mediums will be most successful in keeping pace with the class and fully engaging in exercises and activities.

The registration fee includes all materials, weekly access to world-class art in the museum’s galleries, hours of expert instruction, and access to a Friday afternoon Open Studio during the run of the class.