Illustration Research and Blog
A space where I keep and write about all my findings to do with illustration.
The difference between a designer and an Illustrator
A designer
often relies on a set of elements — images, typography, etc. and organizes them in engaging compositions. The main task of the designer is to focus the attention of the viewer on a certain visual concept, idea, detail, part of the design and to make an idea appealing and memorable.
An illustrator
more often produces the imagery himself/herself and not necessarily work on the whole design of the “product”. The illustrations are often supportive to other mediums — for example, illustrations often accompany newspaper articles, books, magazines and they most often serve to support and better translate ideas, texts and/or further explain them. More often than not, illustrators try to keep the balance between visual and text andtry not to steal all the focus on the illustration.
An illustration is a drawing, painting or printed work of art which explains, clarifies, illuminates, visually represents, or merely decorates a written text, which may be of a literary or commercial nature
Modern styles and types of illustration techniques
As we discussed before, with the advancement of the electronics and stepping into the, so called digital era, the possibilities for artists to express themselves grew rapidly and more freely. The first electronic handwriting device was invented back in 1888. Since then, the technology became more sophisticated and many illustrators and designers are accustomed to using graphics tablets nowadays — devices, which are connected to a computer. Artists use the tablet’s pen and surface to draw and the device transfers the image in the opened drawing software — such as Phothoshop. Artrage, Ikscape and other. The software programs imitate different traditional brushes, pens, various drawing tools, paper and effects.
We can divide the illustrations produced digitally into two large groups:
1. Freehand digital illustrations
As you can see from the pictures below, the freehand digital illustrations allow very smooth light and shadow transitions, making a complex background and fine detail. Most of these illustrations are in a raster format and they can be blowed up and printed only to certain sizes before they loose quality. You can read more about the differences between raster and vector images in our article.
2. Vector graphics
In the other group fall vector graphics/illustrations. The way the images are produced allows scaling it up and down to any size, without any quality loss. By rule, it is harder to make a smooth transition with vectors, but vector has its advantages in producing a certain style of imagery and it is very popular for web illustration. You can easily recognize the vector by its clear outlines, shapes and definition.
Illustration Teardowns: Conceptual Devices
In this article the author looks at inspiring illustrations which use the skill of anomaly(something that deviates from what is standard, normal.). These include:
- Shape manipulation
- The impossible but imaginable.
- This becomes that — One device is to make a thing become another thing, or, using physical metaphor.
- Thought provoking
- Sillyness
Illustration tutorial
My version of the tutorial. I did this tutorial to help strengthen my illustration skills and learn new tricks.
