SCBWI TEAM BLOG Exclusive: Details about the Illustrators' Intensive

 Hey friends,

Word on the street is you've never seen a live painting demo by a world-class illustrator. Or, maybe you've seen one, but have you seen SEVEN IN A ROW?

You will if you sign up for the Post-Conference Intensive for Illustrators at the 40th Anniversary SCBWI Summer Conference in LA this August.

And you still CAN sign up for this Intensive, but time is running out.

Some of the committee (L-R Priscilla Burris, Pat Cummings, and Cecilia Yung)

One thing I love about the SCBWI Int'l Illustrator Committee is that they are always having a ball. Always mixing it up—the Intensive this year is a new format. I asked Pat Cummings about the committee's decision to have seven of the world's best illustrators do live demos for attendees. And here's what the committee said:

The Illustration Committee of the Board usually begins planning programs no later than six months in advance. For this conference, we started even earlier.  We had gathered for the opening of The Golden Kite exhibit at the NCCIL Gallery in Texas last July and, surrounded by so much exquisite work, we all felt it would be fitting to have a wealth of top illustrators for the 40th Anniversary Conference.

The surveys we've collected after each Intensive repeatedly indicate a real curiosity about technique: How do the illustrators who present programs actually create the work they show?  So what better way, we thought, to celebrate SCBWI's 40th Anniversary than to invite top illustrators to demonstrate just that.  Show us how the magic happens.

Over the next few months we floated names, assessed techniques, refined our list, checked to see if speakers might fit into the larger schedule and by the Winter Conference, we were ready to begin inviting speakers.  Each illustrator invited is at the top of his/her game and each will present something dramatically different.  It will be an explosive, exciting, probably exhausting day but it will definitely be a memorable example of the scope of talent members will find at an SCBWI conference.

So hooray for this Intensive! The next few weeks I'll be posting some Q&As with a few of those demo-ers, I cannot wait for August.