5 Free Online Classes for Improving your Writing Skills

Personalize your illustrations and children’s books with useful techniques from creative writing experts

Following a narrative course can help you find your own style and put illustrations into words that will enhance their communicative power.

Children's stories, in which words have a central role emphasizing every image, are the best narrative examples, but they are not the only ones.

Under the guidance of five illustration, publishing, and creative writing experts, you can learn to create stories for your images. They will give you tips on facing your fear of the blank page and help you experiment with visual and textual elements. Click on the red links to access and enjoy the classes!

Free Class: Inspiration and advice

In this video, author and creative writing professor Alberto Chimal suggests you ask yourself the following question during your creative process: What next? To create your own illustrated story, you need to find new ideas. These can only come from you because, as Alberto says, inspiration is an initial desire that you need to feel and work on.

Find out by following his class, taken from his course Introduction to Narrative Writing.

Free Class: The joke

Do you know what the main features of a joke are? Using a few examples, cartoonist Raúl Salazar explains the fundamentals of comic strips, where words have the same importance as the sketches. By following his method, adapted to your own style, you will also be able to create jokes.

This class is part of his course Graphic Humour for Beginners, in which you learn to conceptualize and draw topical strips.

Free Class: Techniques to write everywhere

Can something be written anywhere? While you think about it, Shaun Levin, author and creative writing professor, suggests you remain open to everything going on around you and start filling up your notebooks with stories. In this lesson, Shaun will guide your writing practice and give you tips to overcome your fear of the blank page, both with words and images.

Pick up your tools and jump into this class, part of his course Creative Writing for Beginners: Bringing Your Story to Life.

Free Class: Cover, text writing, and closing

If you want to learn how to improve your illustrations' storytelling power, this is your class. Paloma Valdivia, illustrator, author, and publisher, explains how to add text and images to complement your story. She also shows you effective ways to conclude your story with a simple exercise.

To learn even more, you can follow the whole of Paloma’s course From Autobiography to Illustrated Story.

Free Class: Types of narrators, points of view. The time of the story and the time of the narration.

If you are passionate about children’s stories and want to write one of your own, you should know that every little detail of a story must captivate the young readers. This creative process requires a narrator, a specific time for events to develop, and an order in which they happen. Take a peek into this lesson by publisher and teacher Natália Mendez.

Learn about all these elements and how to apply them in your editorial project. There’s a lot more to learn in her course Narrative Techniques for Children’s Books.

These classes are free to follow until 28th March 2021. If you’d like to refer to the material after this date you can sign up for the relevant Domestika course.

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