Someone once said, 'A laborer creates with his hands. A craftsman creates with his hands and his head. And an artist creates with his hands, his head and his heart.' The Academy exists to help you be whoever you want to be.

This is exactly the kind of education I wish I'd had. It's the most up to date concise information available on an ongoing basis from award-winning artists working in the trenches, not from the disconnected clouds of academia.

Fifteen years ago we developed The Illustration Academy as an alternative education to fill a void in the information from Art and Design Colleges. During the last fifteen years The Illustration Academy has offered life-changing results for many young illustrators and painters by delivering our students the most accurate and current information that exists from artists who have excelled in the professional community. Today, the information offered by Art and Design Colleges comes even less from the professional community, making the need for an alternative education essential.

TAD is purposely designed to bring the grammar of art and professional career based information directly to students of art around the world. I went to art school for six years. I remember how much I benefited from crossing paths with actual professional information at The Illustration Academy. I landed scholarships and jobs because of it. Years later, I have seen the lives that have been changed around the world, from holding the ConceptArt.Org and Massive Black workshops. The best students strive daily to reach their goals and have the strongest success when given the information they need see their career dreams come true. TAD is the educational program art students have asked for and I wish I could have had when I was getting started.

My mentors, The Art Department instructors, were able to teach me the lessons between the lines of my textbooks. The application of this knowledge has allowed me to graduate from their student to their peer.

When I was young and struggling to find my way with drawing and painting there were precious few places to go to learn what I so desperately needed to know. The library was number one, then came the magazine rack at the local grocery store, as well as bookstores, both new and used. These were my haunts, and I practically lived at any one of these places.

My teachers, my galleries were my comic books and paperback book covers. I was intimately familiar with the artists who drew and painted my favorite stories and heroes. It was through emulation that I was able to find my way with drawing and painting. That was a long row to hoe.

There was no internet, only a magazine (Comixscene, later Mediascene) that ran wonderful interviews with my art heroes, and I would run out and buy the nib that so-and-so said they used, finding out the hard way that there was no magic brush, just knowledge gained through doing. And while I wouldn't trade that sense of self-discovery for the world, I would have killed for this program.

To actually learn from artists doing what I aspired to do with my life, would have been priceless. To be able to ask the questions I needed the answers to and hear them straight from the source would have been a godsend.

And here it is. There is nothing else like it.

Society, technology, and education have at long last converged. The Art Department is the education of the present and the future; being taught by those that practice their craft and live their lives at the highest levels of excellence.

The Illustration Academy is around-the-clock, hands-on, absolutely intense immersion in all things visual. As a student there, I found the studio camaraderie and energy level intoxicating, and now, as an instructor, I'm still addicted to it. The willingness of everyone involved to share all aspects of their craft creates an atmosphere unmatched to its ability to inspire. The perspectives and habits I learned at the Academy set an example that I could follow to become successful as a professional illustrator, but even more importantly helped prepare me to continue to learn in my journey as an artist.