We have a new tutorial on our Students Own Tutorials section on our website and we would love for you to go and have a look. We have two tutorials there so far by graphic design students and we are always happy to hear from our students who are taking any of our courses to submit their own tutorials too.

Warasiri Kaewongwon has very kindly explained how she created her Wonderful Perfume box 3d packaging design and you can see some of her photos below from the tutorial. You can visit Warasiri’s tutorial here - Wonderful Packaging Tutorial and we would like to thank Warasiri for taking the time to create this for us and we hope that it helps other students in their design processes.

We have two new student success stories on our website, you might like to have a read of them for inspiration. Michelle Oak, who is currently on the Graphic Design course  scored a fantastic commission to create a logo for a bathrooms company. Read Michelles Story here.

I have also recently caught up with Geraldine Boley who completed her Pet Portrait Diploma some times ago. She is now studying for a Foundation Degree in Applied Art and Design. Read Geradlines Story here.

Andrea has recently had her first exhibition of her work and she was kind enough take take some photos and write some text about her experiences below. We are thrilled for her and hope this is first of many!

Bank Holiday Monday (May 3 2010) I did my first ever exhibition and thought you might like to share some of my experiences.

It was a local art exhibition held at the church in Hambleton, near Rutland Water and after delivering some leaflets to try and drum up some commission work a lady rang me and asked if I would like to exhibit….fantastic I thought, at least my leaflets had paid off a little (as no one came back to me with any commissions L ).

So, two weeks to prepare I emailed Melanie to ask for any advice she may have to share and had a browse through the forums to pick up a few tips.  I’m so glad I put in a good effort to prepare as it made the whole day much more stress free than I anticipated.  My partner works in the printing industry and managed to print a large poster displaying some photos of previous work that I had done as I hadn’t got the actual portraits to exhibit.

I gathered about half a dozen portraits that I had done as practice pieces, some business cards and hand out flyers from Vista Print, my photo portfolio, easel and a table cloth and headed off to the exhibition.  Just by pure luck I got myself prime position, facing the doorway which was great.   The exhibition was a joint event with Hambleton Open Gardens which helped to attract more people, the guys collecting the entrance fees estimated that there was around 600-700 people pass through the gates!

I didn’t get any firm orders for commissions on the day but I had a good number of people take my details and talk very promisingly of ordering portraits for Birthday presents and Christmas presents.  The Rutland Times came and took my photo as I was the only one working on the easel (you may recognise its one of Nicks reference photos J J ) so hopefully I might even appear in the local newspaper.

All in all I had a great day, met some lovely people, exchanged details of some other artists and thoroughly enjoyed myself.  I would definitely do it again but next time, as Melanie advised, I will take as many portraits as I can to sell on the day rather than just offering to take commissions.   Photos of the day below…

Andrea

We are absolutely thrilled to hear Debi won the Children’s Illustration competition to illustrate the book ‘Henry Talks to God’ The winning illustration and Debis reaction is below. We wish her every success with this book – the first of many we hope, and we look forward to seeing a copy if it when it is finished, hopefully to show our students on the college news blog!

I cant say just how excited I feel to have won this wonderful opportunity to illustrate my first childrens book. I loved creating this illustration, Christiana’s writing is beautifully descriptive and conjured up very inspiring ideas for me, I am thrilled and delighted that she and Abela publishing have chosen me to work with them on this project.

I feel blessed that my career has gotten off to such a flying start! many many thanks to LAC and especially Jan for her wonderful tuition, help and advice.

I’m so excited now to get to work and make my dream of illustrating a childrens book into a reality!
Debi Mountford
( Moonstone )

Abela Publishing – Henrys Book

Theresa Smith has just undertaken the Botanical Course one and is hoping now to move onto the second botanical course. Theresa has kindly written a piece for us below and its accompanied by some of her lovely work. The standard of her pieces are very high and I am really looking forward to seeing what Theresa produces on the next course.

“As is often the case, I enjoyed art as a child but didn’t continue with it seriously on leaving school.  I’ve worked as an architectural technician for twenty something years so have a great deal of technical drawing experience, but attempts to get back into artistic drawing and painting have been short lived.

Plants and wildlife were always favourite subjects in childhood drawings so a year ago I enrolled on the Botanical Illustration 1 Certificate course, hoping it would help me focus on getting going again and move forward with my artwork.

Once into the course I thoroughly enjoyed working through the exercises and easily found the motivation to work at them on regular basis. I’ve gained a great deal of satisfaction from completing the course and do feel my work has improved because of it, with many thanks going to my tutor, Lynette Conway, for her help and advice.

Lynette was tremendously encouraging throughout, so much to say that I am now making a start on Botanical Illustration 2 Certificate course.”

Andrea is one of my students on my Pet Portrait Diploma course and As I opened up her work for assessment I saw a wonderful image, hand drawn on a double page of an old book. I was absolutely thrilled to see this inspiring drawing in front of me. I always trying to encourage my students to think for themselves, to think outside the box, go beyond the normal boundaries. Many artists just seem to blend in with each other because they produce the same work in the same style and I try to encourage everyone to be an individual. Andrea has done just this and its a great start to her course. Try to stand out in the sea of artists on the Internet and people will remember you.

I asked Andrea if we could have a back story to her drawing for our blog on how she created the image and I hope that you are not only inspired by her words below but also moved too.

Because of a Storm

I work as a graphic designer for more than 20 years. When I was a child, I used to draw all the time, because my father, despite of being a doctor, is a great artist. After 12, I don’t remember drawing any more. Last October I went to Rome to visit my aunt and, as I was going to spend more than a month, I searched a drawing class. After 5 lessons, the teacher encouraged me to start oil painting. As I’m asthmatic, I never thought I could ever use oil tints! But she showed me Artisan, from Winsor & Newton – the odourless tints, mixable with water. I remember that my hands were trembling as I painted the first picture with the teacher’s tints. I came back to Brazil – where I belong – and decided that I would give a chance to art. As I LOVE animals and nature, I found Melanie and her incredible pet portraits on web.

Two weeks ago, I went to visit my parents and couldn’t come back because of a terrible storm. As I had spare time, I decided to start the first set of Melanie’s graphite exercises there. I didn’t have proper paper at that moment, so I remembered that I had read this on Melanie’s proposition: “Make your drawing unique.” So, I asked my mother if she had some recipe book from my Grandma. I chose 2 pages (approx A5 size each): one with a biscuit recipe and other with the word “Tortas”, wich means “Pies”. Then, I choose 3 small kitchenware: glass jar – that my mother filled with milk – , a bowl with 3 eggs and a whisk. I put all of them on a table with a sheet of paper as background and started trying to create a shadow with a strong light source. I had lot of difficult to reproduce the scene – because I’m not used to draw – and was not sure if Melanie would accept it, as I used that odd paper…..It was delicious to draw while my parents were watching TV. It seemed old times…. I forgot for some hours That I have a husband and kids…..Suddenly I was a child again…..

My Grandmother died some years ago. She was a strong character lady that loved to cook and left her recipes, which are prepared now as a way of not forgetting her. Nowadays I can tell that I admire her. But when I was a teenager, we used to discuss sometimes. As she was born, her mother died and because of that, she was raised up from her grandparents. Life was not easy for her till she met my Grandfather. I think that this contributed for her difficult personality. She is always with me, as I carry her golden medal on a necklace all the time. Art. I don’t know where it will take me, but this road brought magic back to my life!  Andrea

Andreas Drawing above and her grandmothers book below.

Sarah Bowie has been extremely successful in the time she has been completing the Children’s Illustration Diploma course. Sarah’s work is featured in our student gallery and one of her final pieces for the course is depicted below along with a guide of how Sarah created this unique piece of artwork. Sarah has very kindly written a piece for us below and we are thrilled that she has already completed a set of illustrations for a book. We wish Sarah all the best in her future career.

Like so many people I had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school at 17.  Rather, perhaps I knew deep down what I wanted to do, but was overwhelmed with what I should be doing.  Even though I had spent my childhood drawing and writing stories, I ended up studying marketing, which is a subject I had absolutely no affinity with whatsoever.  Of course, the moment I graduated and began working in financial services I realised what a terrible mistake I had made.  It was a slow, long journey – attending life-drawing classes in the evening after a very stressful day in a busy bank.  I thought about going back to art college full-time, but not only was it very expensive, I just didn’t feel it was right for me.  After several years of experimenting with various painting and drawing techniques I realised what I wanted to do was children’s book illustration and ultimately writing too.  I knew that this is what I had been searching for all those years.  However I found it incredibly difficult to remain focused and put a portfolio together.  I’d get disheartened and give up on pieces before they were finished.  That’s where London Art College comes in.  I was idly surfing the web one day when I stumbled across this distance-learning course in children’s book illustration.  I signed up straight away!  The course was well structured and gave sample briefs similar to what one might get in real life.  Jan, the tutor, was always friendly and encouraging and really helped me to build confidence in my own ability.  At the completion of each brief I felt a great sense of achievement, and had something tangible to put in my portfolio.  Just before I finished the course I got a commission to illustrate a picture book for a small publishing company.  I’m busy working on that now, and I really feel that Jan and the London Art College were instrumental in helping me to focus and build confidence in my work.

Info Regarding ‘Singer of Starlight’

I really wanted to get a ‘worn’ feel to this picture, like an old print.  While I love working digitally, I love the textures you get from prints, paint and pencils that I just don’t think you can fully emulate digitally.  There was no plan as I approached this piece, just a lot of playing about.  Here’s what I did:

• A pencil drawing (ie girl and granny) done the ‘old-fashioned’ way on paper and scanned into photoshop
• A sheet of sepia watercolour on thick, spongy paper which I tore into with a compass needle and scalpel (to add texture)
• A monoprint (simply black printing ink on an acetate that happened to have holes punched in it)
• I scanned these in in layers beneath the line drawing, and played around with  rubbing out here and there so that some areas show more sepia and some more black ink.
• I then over-painted with various photoshop brushes to fill in the characters and add in more black where needed.

Really this was just a lot of experimentation.  It’s handy knowing how to use photoshop and then being able to combine it with more traditional techniques.

Debi has just completed the Children’s illustration Diploma course and we are proud to showcase her work along with her story on this blog. I hope that you find it inspiring.

“…..After being diagnosed with restrictive health problems in 2005 i needed to find a focus in my life.
I was watching the wonderful Charles Evans programme one day and he really inspired me to pick up my paints again and have a go, I have no formal art training as such and reneged on a place at Art College in the 70′s in favour of getting a job….i needed to fund getting to my Punk rock gigs somehow!

I have worked as a Detail Painter in the past, painting fine china and plaques, after re-discovering the joy of painting again i decided that that was all the therapy i needed, i have always loved Illustration and would sit for hours from a young age trying to emulate the beautiful, highly detailed illustrations in my Faery story books. I wondered if there might be a Home Study course somewhere on this subject, fired up the computer and found this almost straight away!

I enrolled as soon as i could and with the gentle, encouraging and wonderfully humerous tuition of Jan I could feel my confidence returning, I am nearly at the end of the course now and it has taken me a little longer than some due to my health problems ( and the soiree’s into the Pet Portrait world! thanks Melanie and the members of Pet Portrait forum for their wonderful help when i needed to earn some money to fund art materials! )

My goal at the moment is to finish the course and strive to do the best work I can ( and get the trim marks and bleed right for once!!! not my strongest point! ) then embark on the follow up course and see where I end up, but for the moment im enjoying the journey immensely!…”
Debi aka Moonstone

Paul Rathborne has now completed the children’s illustration diploma course and we have showcased a few of his pieces below. He has very kindly written us a short paragraph about his work too. We wish Paul all the best with his children’s book.

Before beginning the Illustrating Children’s Books course, I didn’t have any formal training or qualifications in art or design. I needed a purpose and direction for my aimless doodles, and a genuine reason for getting marker pen stains on the sofa and paint spots on the conservatory floor to tell my girlfriend. My course tutor, Jan Nesbitt, has given me the confidence, guidance and focus to enable me to experiment with new mediums. Each assignment has offered new challenges and I have found this very rewarding. The skills developed on this course have inspired me to begin work on my own children’s book.

Sarah Palmer completed the children’s illustration course and has very kindly allowed us to use some of her work here and has written a paragraph for us about her and her work. I hope that you enjoy reading about Sarah’s journey and viewing her beautiful illustrations, and we wish her the best of luck in her artwork.

“…..I completed a Graphic Design degree in 2000, but after university I began working for a charity, and have worked in similar jobs ever since.  I missed having a creative outlet and it was while I was searching for something to do in my spare time that I stumbled upon the London Art College website.  The Children’s Illustration diploma caught my eye so I enrolled… and I’m so glad I did!  It’s been informative, enjoyable and rewarding – and Jan, my tutor, has been so encouraging.  I was really chuffed to receive my certificate in the post this morning, and to find that I had passed with distinction.  I am determined, now, to pursue my dream of illustrating for children and I’m looking forward to starting the extension course.  If you’re considering the Children’s Illustration diploma, I would thoroughly recommend it!….”