In the hour-long (free) workshop video (above) illustrator and graphic designer Wendy Martin discusses how she and other illustrators have been using Adobe Illustrator to produce their final art for children's book assignments.

You can see it enlarged in full screen on YouTube and adjust the setting to 720p high definition once the video has started playing.

Vector art, with its peculiarly crisp, glossy and highly commercial look is the medium of choice for many educational publishers, kids' game up developers, stock art houses and companies that license artists' work for merchandising.

Wendy shows how it's possible to create lush, painterly-style imagery evocative of fine children's book art using only a handful of the Illustrator tools. She covers drawing and inking with those tools, color blocking using palettes and flat color and shading and creating highlights by applying gradients of values and colors.

She demos her favorite tools: the brush and blob brush tools, the blend and gradient mesh tools and the rectangle tool and how she tweaks these to create her lovely effects.

She talks about how she likes to blend her art with traditional mediums like watercolor and color pencils for the fun, pleasure and sheer joy of it and you can do it, too!

Wendy's recorded class sessions will get you up and running with the dazzling tools of Adobe Illustrator: Signup takes only 30 seconds.

Scroll down for details and student testimonials!

Can you find these 10 hidden pictures in the "Band Practice" scene? (on the right)

Band Practice by Wendy Martin

Vector Your Kids' Book Art: Adobe Illustrator for Children's Book Illustrators 

A highly focused, self-paced course for illustrators interested in creating children's book art in vector graphics. Recorded from the weekly sessions that Wendy Martin taught to 19 online students in February

• Class night 1: Create your concept art, rough pencils.
• Class night 2: Import your sketches into Illustrator and inking (If you are getting the 30-day trial of the software, sign up for it AFTER you are ready to begin inking.)
• Class night 3: Produce color comps, starting with flat color.
• Class night 4: Add shading and details.
• Class night 5: Pull it all together.
• Class night 6: Q&A Session with Wendy, Mark and students.

Click the green button above to register while the videos and other course content are still available.

Let accomplished digital and traditional professional illustrator Wendy Martin show you, over the course of six hour-long video sessions how to use Adobe Illustrator, the world's foremost vector image creation software to create painterly, multi-layered illustrations, including for your next promotional postcard for children's book art directors, editors and client prospects.

Tools You'll need:

• If you already have Adobe Creative Suite, you have Illustrator. If you don't you can try it out via Adobe's Trial Subscription for the Creative Cloud Suite. You can complete Wendy's class and create your promotional postcard within the 30 days of the free trial.
• Small Wacom tablet, like a Bamboo or Intuous with a stylus or similar (recommended for best results. You can use a mouse to draw, but you won't have pressure sensitivity functionality.
• Scanner or smart phone or digital camera to snap photos of your pencil sketches that you'll import into your AI software
• Pencil and copy paper, tracing paper or sketchbook to draw on

Only $149

Click the green button above to register while the videos and other course content are still available.