Register

Ilustratour: Total Immersion in Spain

By Peggy Roalf   Wednesday May 21, 2014

For two weeks this summer, the Museu Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, Spain, again plays host to Illustratour. This total-immersion experience for illustrators offers seminars, workshops, portfolio reviews, one-on-one talks with established illustrators, together with exhibitions, contests and more.

The program for the first week alone includes seminars and workshops led by Serge Bloch, Alex Mather, Rotraut Susanne Berner, Max, and Katsumi Komagata.

Workshops delve into professional development as much as exploring artistic concerns. For example Rotraut SusanneBerner, author and illustrator of award-winning children’s books engages participants in personal discovery by having them ask, “What is important to me? What do I need? What do I want? What do I like? What do I fear? These are some of the questions that will inspire the first part of this workshop. From them, each participant will work on a very personal and individual image: images that, put together, will serve as a starting point to generate spontaneous stories in which these personal images start interacting with each other.”

 

Serge Bloch, whose workshop is on covers says, “The cover of a book plays an important role: together with the title, it generates an initial atmosphere and conveys a visual message to the reader. The wrapper arouses our attention in bookstores and encourages us to discover the inside. The same goes for the cover of a magazine. In this workshop, we will work on designing the covers of the books and how to illustrate the contents and the information of a magazine and its connection to the cover.”

For successful artists whose style has perhaps become too much a brand, Pablo Amargo’s workshop is focused on breaking the mold. He says, “If there is an emotional commitment between the illustrator and the object to illustrate, this is when more questions and creative responses arise. 'Single' is a workshop that pursues to foster the emotional bonding, the initiative and the risk of the different participants towards the work done. 'Single' hides little lessons that illustrators may apply on their own future work. It is aimed at those illustrators who have their own techniques and wish to spend a week exploring different creative possibilities.”

 

Last year, Chris Haughton, an award-winning Irish illustrator and co-founder of Node, a fair trade social business that connects western artists with Nepalese artisan carpet makers, gave a design workshop. He said this about the program: “To any illustrators, especially professional illustrators and designers who are looking to get more into picture book illustration or illustration in general I would highly recommend taking a week out to visit Spain for Ilustratour…. I was asked to give a workshop and talk at Ilustratour last year and I was blown away by the whole experience. I would have got a lot from visiting these workshops as a participant. It is a 5-day course and then a weekend of talks. Last year Oliver Jeffers, Kitty Crowther, Nosy Crow, Marc Boutavant, Axel Scheffler and David Weisner among others gave talks and workshops amongst others in the beautiful town of Valladolid. A really lovely week of meeting new people and seeing inspiring new work.”

Apart from being the birthplace of Cervantes and home today to a world-class football team, Valladolid offers great wines and (according to The Guardian) “some of the best tapas bars in the country.”

The 7th annual edition of Illustratour takes place from June 30 to July 11 in Valladolid, SpainInformationRegisterPreview on YouTube.

To get your subscription to DART: Design Arts Daily, go here.


DART