The Secret Treehouse

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you’ll see I launched The Secret Treehouse with a few picture book illustrator friends last week!

The Secret Treehouse is a project we’ve been working on behind the scenes for a few months. Right now it’s part community/part blog/part art collective and we’re excited to see what this little tree will grow into. We want It to be a place to talk about art and process and tips. A place to share resources and to talk about what it’s really like to be a professional illustrator. Is it really a dream career? What’s the money really like?

There are a lot of possibilities, but one of the first resources we’re excited to share are portfolio reviews. We were all lucky to get direct insight from professionals early in our collective journey to becoming illustrators, and we agree that it was one of the most valuable things we could do.

But it comes at a cost. Courses and conferences, not to mention travel, are expensive and out of reach for a lot of aspiring illustrators. We’d like to make professional feedback more accessible.

To celebrate the launch, we plan to do a drawing for some free ones (everyone who signs up for our newsletter will automatically be entered ), but we hope to make them available in the long term.

We also plan to add new artists over time. Right now, we’re starting small, but we want to include new voices and perspectives, artists whose work and spirit excites us and hopefully you, too.

I hope you will join us as we strive to make The Secret Treehouse a wonderful place to hang out!