Different Children’s book illustration styles
Different style of illustration for kids book
Style is quite a broad term. It can refer to cartoon-style or realistic, whimsical, stylized, watercolor, charcoal, etc.
Or it can relate to an individual artist’s drawing or painting style, or “hand”. Of course, choose an illustrator with an individual style that appeals to you.
I won’t discuss individual’s styles here (since they’re as varied as there are illustrators in the world!) I’ll just go over general styles you could choose for your book illustrations.
Before we get into all the different styles, please also note that there are two major divisions in illustrations. These are traditional vs. digital.
- Traditional illustrations, in brief, are paint, pencil, charcoal, pen, any medium–on paper.
- Digital illustrations are made on the computer.
Illustrators can combine these two, and they often do. Digital illustrations have become more and more common for children’s book illustrations.
One isn’t better than the other. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but in the end it comes down to a matter of taste (and budget — traditional art is often more expensive). It’s also good to note that digital has developed to a point where it can closely imitate all forms of traditional art.
Let’s go through the major styles of children’s book illustrations.
To keep things simple, I’ll divide style into two parts:
- The genre or drawing style of the illustrations
- The medium used to create the illustrations
It’s also important to understand I’ll be sharing one or a few examples of each, but in each case there are many more variations that will give you a different feel and look. I can’t share all the possibilities in one article, so I’ve chosen only a few. If you want to see more of a certain drawing style or medium, Google is your friend
#1 Genre or drawing style
For children’s books, drawing styles include the following:
- Cartoon–cute or childlike
- Cartoon–whacky or funny
- Realistic
- Whimsical
- Line drawings
- Sketchy drawings
- Stylized
Looking at the examples below, you ‘ll see styles overlap. All the styles from number 4 to 7 are also either cartoon or realistic. Whimsical drawings can also be stylized, and so on.
Cartoon — cute or childlike
Cartoon style drawings have exaggerated features and are not true to life. The style can vary and some of the other drawing style categories listed above are subdivisions of “cartoon”. I divided cartoons into two main styles, the first being cute or childlike. This is the style you see for many children’s books, especially younger kids.
Example:
Cartoon — whacky or funny
Because of the exaggeration in the drawings, cartoon lends itself perfectly to funny or whacky illustrations.
Example:
Realistic
Children’s books are almost never hyper-realistic. “Realistic” here refers to fairly true to life proportions, versus cartoon style that is not true to life. In children’s books realistic illustrations can be simplistic, or detailed.
Examples:
Whimsical
Whimsical illustrations are charming, childlike, carefree, dreamy, fun and colorful.
Example:
Line drawings
Line drawings are outline drawings that aren’t colored and have no gradation (no different colors or grey-scale). It’s (normally) drawn in one color and only uses lines.
These can also be used for coloring books.
Example:
Sketchy drawings
Sketchy drawings are drawings that are unrefined and still look more like rough sketches than final illustrations. They can vary in their refinement and be rough, or hardly rough at all. Often they don’t have color. Sketchy drawings are often expressive, which can be a nice touch.
Example:
Stylized
Stylized illustrations are not realistic and don’t have natural, conventional forms. They are often simplified, or made up of geometric shapes or patterns. They also often have flat colors.
Example:
#2 Medium
Though they’re not the same thing, style and medium are often used interchangeably or overlap. This is understandable, since the medium influences the appearance.
The following media are used for children’s books:
- Watercolor
- Acrylic
- Gouache
- Pencil
- Charcoal
- Ink or pen
- Wood cutting (not common anymore)
- Metal etchings (not common anymore)
- Lithography
- Collage
- Multimedia
Then, these last two are a slightly different category, but we can divide digital illustrations as follows:
- Freehand digital illustrations
- Stylized digital illustrations
Watercolor
Watercolor is a painting method with water-based paint. Use more watery paint, and you get more transparent, softer images. These illustrations are mostly whimsical, delicate, gentle or sentimental. Less watery paint makes for sharper, brighter images.
Example:
Acrylic
Acrylic paint is a fast-drying paint and can also be used watery or thicker than watercolor, making for more opaque colors and texture.
Gouache
Gouache is another type of paint and can again be mixed with water to change the consistency. It can be used dry, for what is called a dry brush effect that is textured.
Example:
Pencil
There are graphite (grey scale) pencil drawings or color pencil drawings.
Example:
Charcoal
Soonchild by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Alexis Deacon, is an example of charcoal illustrations.
Ink or Pen
Shel Silverstein’s books are famous examples of pen-and-ink illustrations.
Wood Cutting
Wood cutting is a technique of cutting an image into wood and then using this to print.
This method is uncommon today and would require a big budget for your illustrations. I’ve included it as artists mimic this style with drawing (not actual wood cutting). So if you like this style, you could get a similar look for your illustrations.
Metal Etchings
Metal etching was the most common form of creating book illustrations from the late 1500s to the early 1800s. It can achieve detail wood cutting cannot. There are different types of metal etching, but in brief it entails producing images on metal plates, which are then used for printing.
Lithography
Lithography is another printing process. A flat surface is treated with oil in areas to create an image. The oil repels ink and thus an image is created by the ink only sticking to the desired areas, which are then printed. Different colors can also be created in one image by doing multiple prints, one color at a time.
While not as common as most other media in this list, lithography is still in use.
Collage
Collage is made by attaching different materials such as cut or torn paper, photographs or fabric onto paper or a backing.
Eric Carle, author of the famous The Very Hungry Caterpillar, did all his book illustrations in collage. He painted tissue paper with acrylic for his collages.
Mixed media
This is a combination of different media. Mixed media is common in children’s book illustrations. Examples include watercolor and pencil; or ink, charcoal and any kind of paint combined.
Digital — Freehand
These illustrations are created digitally, in various kinds of software. Freehand digital art is drawn as one would draw on paper. Thus the shapes and lines are organic (not perfect geometry, exact straight lines etc.). There is also often shading.
There are sub-categories in this medium, but I’ll only mention freehand raster and freehand vector illustrations. Raster illustrations means the images are drawn in pixels (tiny dots on that make up the images on a computer screen). These drawings tend to have more natural shading, more organic and “imperfect” lines and look more like traditional art.
With vector illustrations the information is stored as mathematical statements. For our purposes, all that matters is the appearance. Vector illustrations often have more “perfect”, smooth lines and shapes (e.g. perfect circles), flatter colors and hard/crisp edges to the shading (instead of soft, blurry-edged shading).
As digital illustrations software has advanced, there are more and more ways to make raster resemble vector and vector like raster illustrations. But no need to get too technical in this article.
This is a broad category, and these illustrations can be extremely varied.
Verdict
They were our collection of styles for children book.They are all different in every way of imagination and drawing. Though Illustrations that are mostly used today in children books are digital version illustrations, but there are demand for other style also.