IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES

Wild Blue Yonder is a watercolor mixed-media illustration course built around one dreamy, sky-filled scene — billowing clouds, bitty birds in flight, paper airplanes carrying top-secret messages, radiant sunshine, and a rainbow arching over it all. This is a single, richly layered start-to-finish illustration course structured around Danielle's creative process: Prepare, Practice, and Imagine. You'll begin by planning your color palette and composition through thumbnail drawing, then work through four dedicated breakdown exercises — backgrounds and rainbows, clouds, birds, and airplanes — before bringing everything together in a nearly two-hour final project video. Along the way you'll learn to paint large watercolor washes, assemble paper-pieced elements, add optional stitching, and even work through how to correct inevitable mistakes with confidence.

UNLOCK A NEW SKILL

With a background in graphic design and fine art, I create illustrations that tell hidden stories. What sets Wild Blue Yonder apart is the deliberate emphasis on composition planning before a single drop of paint hits the paper. The thumbnail and color palette exercise at the start of this course isn't a warmup — it's the decision-making session that makes the final illustration possible. Learning to think in thumbnails, to audition a composition in miniature before committing to a full sheet, is one of the most transferable skills a watercolor illustrator can develop. Combined with the ability to paint confident large-scale washes and assemble paper-pieced collage elements seamlessly into a watercolor scene, this course builds the kind of pre-painting intelligence that shows up in everything you make afterward.

BUILD YOUR CRAFT

The four breakdown exercises in this course aren't decorative extras — each one is a focused study of a specific element that lives inside the final illustration. You paint the backgrounds and rainbows first because you need to understand wash behavior before you assemble the scene. You study the clouds, the birds, and the airplanes separately so that when they come together in the final project, your hand already knows what to do. That sequencing — prepare, practice, then imagine — is Danielle's actual working method, and this course lets you experience it from the inside. By the time you sit down for that nearly two-hour final video, you're not starting from scratch — you're finishing something you've already begun, creating a depth that shorter classes simply can't match.

WHAT YOU GET

When you enroll, you'll receive a single downloadable handout packet that covers supplies, orientation, and all the reference material for the exercises and final project. The video curriculum includes a color and thumbnail planning session, four illustration breakdown exercises covering backgrounds and rainbows, clouds, birds, and airplanes, and a complete final project video running nearly two hours from first mark to finished piece. Everything is downloadable and yours to keep.

LEARN OFFLINE, ANYTIME

Every course includes a dedicated Start Here lesson — your personal download hub where all your handout packets and videos are organized and waiting for you. Save everything to your device and keep learning wherever you are, whenever you want.