How many of you are fans of Lilla Rogers? She's an art agent with a true teacher's heart. I first heard of her last year while perusing some illustrators' blogs. I kept seeing MATS class projects popping up in my favorite feeds and had to learn more. MATS stands for Make Art That Sells, a series of classes that Lilla has produced to help illustrators make work that is true to them while being commercially viable. Intrigued, I put myself on the waiting list for the next class and saved up my pennies to enroll.
And that brings us to this project. Right after I quit my day job, Lilla announced a class for creating collections for home décor, and I jumped at the chance. We just finished our first week, all about designing metal items with a bird theme.
The week begins with a mini assignment just to draw the theme without any thought of a final product. My favorite instruction from Lilla is to waste paper, and waste I did! The other students in the class make up an amazing group of supportive artists, and there is a Facebook group for us to privately share our work and thoughts with one another.
The class is a tremendous amount of work for me with a steep learning curve, but I have already learned so much and grown quite a bit as an illustrator. Not too bad for seven days of work!
If you have any interest is these types of courses but would like to test the waters first, Lilla also has a great book out called I Just Like to Make Things that is a great introduction to the commercial potentials for an illustrator with the same sweetness that Lilla seems to bring to all of her projects. It was reading that book that made up my mind to take her class.
And now I'm off to work on this week's theme: florals!
