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Category:Creativity
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Illustrating children's book online art courses

LAST CHANCE for Illustrating Children’s Books until 2027!

Hurry hurry – LAST CHANCE to sign up for our career-changing Illustrating Children’s Books course until 2027! ✨ Imagine building a lucrative career in the magical world of children’s book illustration … ✨ Imagine walking past your favorite book store and seeing a book you illustrated in the front window … ✨ Imagine spending months digging deep into a dreamy children’s book manuscript, creating unique worlds and memorable characters ✨ Imagine getting paid to make art! Our outstanding online course, Illustrating Children’s Books, is on NOW, but there’s still time to sign up. Join now to get instant access to all the class materials released so far, including Daily Sketchbook prompts, lessons on things like pitching, the first Art Director’s Cheat Sheet from Zoë, and bonus lessons from former art agent and illustrator Lilla – check out the full class schedule here. Plus the rest of the class only got


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HURRY! Huge savings start TODAY!

Now is the time to snag those courses you’ve had your eye on! Hurry hurry HURRY – our fabulous Spring Sale is on NOW, with 25% off individual courses and up to 45% off our fabulous bundles! If you want to grow your art, fill your portfolio, explore new art markets and make real money from your art then don’t miss this! Art directors, creative directors, publishers and clients NEED your gorgeous art to sell their products. Plenty of the hot art markets – including children’s books, non-fiction books for adults, greeting cards, and toys, games and puzzles – are booming right now, because people always want books, puzzles and cards. Whether you’re looking for a change of direction, you’re ready to take your illustration career to the next level, or you simply want to grow your art and flex your creative muscles, we’ve got everything you need. Amazing value


Art Career Accelerator What's Your Dream

Art Career Accelerator Week: FREE download and great savings!

What’s your art career dream – and how can fairy artmother Lilla help it come true? Our huge Spring Sale starts Monday, April 13th! We wanted to do something different this time, so to celebrate we’re running a week of fab FREE live Zoom events with art agent Lilla which are all about manifesting with intention, plotting your next career move, and turning your dreams into reality! Join former top art agent Lilla at any or all of her inspiring, informative FREE live events this week and start creating your blueprint for art career success! Announcing our NEW FREE live Zooms with Lilla! An amazing opportunity to get career advice from agent Lilla for FREE! Join Lilla at any one or all of these invigorating, inspiring, lively live events to get your questions answered by a top art agent (and mentor, author, speaker, columnist, educator, illustrator and more) with four


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FREE Art Challenge: Check out the art from our latest assignment

Have you heard about our FREE Quarterly Art Challenge yet? Once a quarter – on March 1st, June 1st, September 1st and December 1st – you get a FREE illustration assignment direct to your inbox. You then have one week to complete it – because nothing cuts through procrastination like a deadline. Art agent Lilla looks at all the art submitted before the deadline, and then picks one (or two) pieces of art which wins prizes like free Make Art That Sells courses, free products, and more. Our most recent free Art Challenge was in March, and, as ever, we loved seeing the beautiful art that you created! Today we’re sharing the two winners (because Lilla couldn’t pick just one!), who each won a free place on Illustrating Children’s Books, plus the Honorable Mentions. March’s challenge was to recreate a fabulous vintage souvenir plate from Lilla’s collection, personalized for your


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How to figure out what to draw

Lilla here. You know that feeling when you want to draw something, but you don’t know what to draw? Here’s what worked for me recently. So here’s the scene. I’m curled up with a steamy espresso, journal, and fountain pen filled with red glitter ink—my morning routine. So far so good. I’m craving making some art, but I don’t know what to draw. You would think I would know what I want to draw after decades and decades of teaching art, making art, agenting, illustrating, and owning pretty much every art supply. But no. I have no ideas. Nada. So first I list the art things that I like doing these days. Let me think … Lettering, Procreate, flowers with Latin names, vintage things, people, drawing packages with lettering on my iPad in Procreate, like this from my 30-Day Style Play challenge from last year. But I still have no


MY MATS SUCCESS Make Art That Sells What REALLY happens in a MATS team meeting

What REALLY happens in a MATS team meeting

The Make Art That Sells team are typically spread across three or four countries and at least three time zones, but we meet once a month by Zoom to catch up and plot and plan for the months ahead. As you can imagine, it’s some pretty high-powered stuff. Shoulder pads up to our ears. We review our profit and loss margins for the last financial quarter and explore our deliverables for the upcoming quarter. We push the envelope and think outside the box. We harvest ideas. We disrupt. We have multiple balls in the air. Ha. Just kidding. Actual photo of MATS team planning. Eighty per cent of the team is British, so by law we have to kick off with some comments on the weather. This causes us problems, because, while we all share a common language, we speak very different units. “It’s like 30 degrees here,” Lilla might


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A Thermos Crisis and a Love Story

Lilla here. I want to share with you a little story I had fun writing and illustrating recently. At a recent team meeting, the team asked if I’d like to include some of my own illustrated writing pieces this month, and I absolutely loved the idea! Plus I thought you could be inspired to write and illustrate your own pieces for yourself, for your own enjoyment or social media. Look out for another piece of writing from me in our blog and newsletter on March 26th! The plastic inner straw of my cherished thermos doesn’t stay attached anymore, rendering it useless. You may feel that this doesn’t constitute a crisis, given the state of the world these days, but nevertheless I am forced to face the fact that I must choose another thermos from my collection. While they are all pretty, none have the qualities of my broken beloved thermos,


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Replay of Live with Lilla: Portfolio Club begins today!

If you missed the wonderful Live with Lilla, below is a replay. If you’ve ever dreamed of building a strong, market-ready illustration portfolio – or you already have some art in your portfolio but want to get noticed by clients so you can get more jobs and make more money – then now is the moment to jump in. You’ll get eight whole months of assignments from me, to take you all the way through to August – how cool is that? Watch the replay below  


Bingo Board 2026

Get your FREE #art career bingo board!

Lilla here. As an agent, one thing that I get asked all the time is: what should I show in my portfolio in order to get illustration jobs? Artists say to me: “Lilla, I have a load of art on my website, but what do I actually NEED?” Gorgeous products in a variety of markets illustrated by some of the artists I represented. There are so many markets out there that need your art! Let me show you how you can get jobs like this. My whole thing is about diversification. In other words, the secret to a successful art career is just like a financial stock portfolio: you don’t know what’s going to give you a ton of work or what art markets going to go up or down, so you need to diversify your investments. That’s why I often talk about having many eggs in many baskets –


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Look! Introducing Lilla’s Art Cart: Art supplies curated especially for you

Lilla here. I can’t wait to tell you about our newest wild adventure! I’m so excited to share my latest adventure with you – it perfectly combines two of my greatest passions: my love of teaching and my love of art supplies. If you’ve ever been to or seen my studio, you probably know that I have practically every art supply in the whole world! Art supplies are my love language From more than five decades in the art biz, I’ve got drawers of gouache and watercolor tubes organized by color; deeply pigmented oil paints and oil mediums; funky, sparkly and chunky acrylic mediums; silky 6B charcoal pencils; soft and absorbent printmaking paper; crispy linoleum blocks; and soft, richly colored handmade pastels sorted in wooden drawers! There’s a good chance I already have every art supply in the world, but I think I probably still need more, right? So just