Instructor Stories: Jessixa Bagley
Introduction
We're thrilled to have the multi-award winning Jessixa Bagley teaching our Watercolors intensive this month. Jessixa Bagley graduated with a BFA in painting and printmaking from Cornish Cornish College of Arts. She has worked in comics, fine arts, and illustration, with her work appearing in publications like the following: Highlights, Nickelodeon Magazine, The Chicago Reader, The Stranger, and The Seattle Weekly. Working on picture books has been a lifelong goal for her.
Alexandra Penfold at Upstart Crow Literary represents Jessixa's picture books, and Neal Porter edits them.
If you'd like to get to know Jessixa a little better, you can watch this fun drawing interview she did with The New York Times Children's Book Editor Maria Russo.
Jessixa's Books
Jessixa's picture books have all received a lot of positive attention. Her debut picture book, Boats for Papa, won many awards, including: a Fall 2015 Junior Library Guild Selection, the SCBWI 2016 Golden Kite Award for Best Picture Book Text, and the 2016 Washington State Scandiuzzi Children's Book Award. The following year, Laundry Day garnered a Junior Library Guild Selection for Fall 2016 and a 2018 Ezra Jack Keats Honor Award for Writing. She collaborated with her husband on Vincent Comes Home. And her next book, Henry and Bea, is coming on October 29, 2019!
Watercolors with Jessixa Bagley
In this In this 50-minute intensive, you'll learn how to sketch an illustration, make a tighter version of it, transfer the tighter version to watercolor paper, ink your pencil drawing, and paint your illustration with watercolors.
Illustrators need a solid foundation in drawing, and this intensive will help you improve those skills before Jessixa teaches you her techniques for painting.
Each of Jessixa's three lessons will have a step-by-step handout to help you implement her techniques. The live review/workshop for this class will be on Sunday, November 3 at noon, PST. If you miss the live review, a replay will be available.
Jessixa also provided one of her own illustrations for students to trace, transfer, and paint for practice. So, if you don't have an idea for an illustration yet, you can still work through the intensive with her.
Book Giveaway Details
For the book giveaway, which IS open to international readers, the winner can choose one book—any book—of Jessixa’s. To enter, you must tell me which book you’d choose in the comments of this post. For additional entries, you can share the post on social media and post a link to where you’ve shared in the comments (preferably as a comment to your original comment so that all of your entries are grouped together).
You can go ahead and ask questions in the comments and interact with each other, but I won’t count those as entries.
I’ll close the contest at midnight PST on October 18. Thanks for reading and sharing!
Blog Contributors
Myrna Foster writes and edits content for Storyteller Academy and the WriteRiders Newsletter for SCBWI Nevada. She has spent a lot of time teaching and coaching children, including five years as a preschool teacher. She's also worked as a journalist, and Highlights High Five has published six of her poems.
Arree Chung is an author/illustrator and the founder of Storyteller Academy. Arree’s Ninja! series has received starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal. Kirkus also gave a starred review to Mixed, which recently won the FCGB award.
Today Arree lives a creative life, making stories for children. Arree spends most of his time making picture books, writing middle grade novels, and sharing his love for art, design, and storytelling with kids and dreamers everywhere.