Watercolor and Mixed Media for Illustrated Books

Get to know Juan Camilo Mayorga as he tells you about his experience as a professional illustrator. He shows you some of his most acclaimed work and also talks about his influences, ranging from drawing and painting to design.

Discover Juan's creative process for tackling a narrative text, interpreting it, and visually expressing it. Learn what a storyboard is, how it works, and its important role as a guide from the very beginning of the process. Next, have a look at the materials you need, their features, and all the different ways you can develop your project.

Get straight into experimenting with techniques. Start doing different exercises exploring watercolors and their behavior on the paper. Familiarize yourself with how pigment works according to moisture levels, learn how to open and close patches, and create a color palette centered around the scenes you want to create.

Juan helps you to define the characters and the spaces they occupy to start the initial technique exploration right up to the details of the final composition on paper.

Then, digitize your images and use some Photoshop tools that help enhance your final project. Now you have your own story illustrated with watercolors and other materials.