Who We Are

What Is It

The Visual Literacy Online Program is for both the serious student and the professional artist. This program provides access to all of the Illustration Academy lessons taught by the world renowned illustrators and painters of today.

The program is about professionals training professionals. It's about real-world training that makes you a better picture maker. This program will help you to develop your portfolio whether you are in school or a working professional. Whether you are entering an Art and Design college, or pursuing a career as a professional, the Visual Literacy Program will help you to obtain scholarships or better clients as a working professional by making your portfolio the best it can be.

The faculty of The Illustration Academy and the Visual Literacy Program is as follows: Mark English, Gary Kelley, Anita Kunz, Chris Payne, C. F. Payne, Jon Foster, George Pratt, Sterling Hundley, John English, Brent Watkinson, and Doug Chayka. These illustrators and picture makers helped design the Visual Literacy Program to be a website that is much like an illustration class, or illustration school. More of an illustration course about design and illustration than most other websites.

Illustration has been around since the cave paintings of Lascaux, France. An illustration, properly made by the illustrator, seeks to clarify, or show more clearly the idea or subject being talked or written about, perhaps in a book or magazine. The actual definition in some dictionaries of illustration is "to clarify."

An illustration course or illustration school is not the design of this illustrator course as much as it is meant to help a illustrator training to become better at picture making. Digital painting is also utilized by some members of the Illustration Academy faculty in our online illustration course, or illustration school, as some people call it. Design is another aspect of The Visual Literacy Program, and The Illustration Academy. Digital painting goes hand in hand in this illustrator class and the illustrator training developed over the past 15 years. An illustration school? An illustration course? Illustrators and illustration training has been part of the Illustration Academy and The Visual Literacy Program since it began.