An illustration is a drawing, photograph, engraving, or other image that explains the text. Illustrations are used to convey the emotional atmosphere of a work of fiction, to visualize the characters of the narrative, to show the objects described in the book (botanical illustration), to display the step-by-step instructions in technical documentation (technical illustration). Book illustration is unique. In it, fine art and literature merge together, revealing new facets of each other. Inspirational words of poetry, psychological portraits of characters, carved with a sharp slate pencil, fascinating stories, told with whimsical strokes of ink.
Every person opening any book, newspaper or magazine has not once noticed artists’ drawings or photographs next to the text. Such images are called illustrations. The word comes from the Latin illustratio, which means illumination, illustration. It complements or accompanies a text.
The term “illustration” can be understood in both a broad and narrow sense. In a broad sense, it is any image that explains a text. There are many drawings, paintings and sculptures, which were made on literary themes, but had an independent artistic value.
In a narrow, strict sense, illustrations are works intended to be perceived in a certain unity with the text, that is, they are in the book and participate in its perception in the process of reading.
The illustrations for a literary work together with it constitute a whole. Book illustrations, withdrawn from the text, can sometimes become incomprehensible and inexpressive. Illustrations are not independent in plot, they must match the content of the literary work. They can enrich or impoverish it. The artist is required to become a co-author of the book, to make visible the ideas and images of the writer, thereby helping to better understand the content, to present more specifically the era, life, the environment of the characters in the book. But this does not mean at all that the illustration should be a simple pictorial and graphic retelling of the text.
Illustrations in the narrow sense of the word thus either explain the text by showing a corresponding visual image, or actively interpret the text. Illustrations help to orient oneself to the content of a book even before reading, attracting readers.
As you know, one and the same word “illustration” refers to images different in content and form, in their significance for the work and the reader, in the connection between the picture and the text, in the technique of execution.
According to the purposes pursued by the image, illustrations can be subdivided into:
- scientific-cognitive (maps, plans, charts, drawings, etc.).
- art-shaped (interpretation of a literary work by means of book graphics).
Illustrations can be an explanatory image to the text, supplementing the text, and the image is almost completely independent, sometimes even subordinate to the text.
Book illustrations have to reckon with the specific features of the book, with the two-dimensionality of the book page, its format, the nature of the font, typesetting, the quality of the printing paper, the color of printing ink, etc. Originally manuscripts were illustrated with miniatures made and colored by hand. After the invention of book printing illustrations were able to be reproduced and took their rightful place in book graphics. Such books were very expensive and quite rare, inaccessible to most ordinary people.
The nature of each artist-illustrator’s illustration system can be evaluated in terms of how he conveys in the illustration the two main categories of all action – space and time. When considering the individual characteristics of the pictorial language, the artist should pay attention to the way he draws the line and places the stain, what kind of movement he gets, what the artist prefers when modeling the form – line and plastic or light and color, how he builds spatial plans, how he distributes black and white, what importance he attaches to silhouette, what compositional principles he mostly uses, how he prefers to convey the character of the characters’ movements and gestures, and so on. All this is often called the artist’s handwriting, although it would be more correct to call these features an individual style.
Thus, book illustration as a special kind of fine art has a tremendous influence on the formation of sensory perception of the world, develops aesthetic sensitivity, expressed primarily in the desire for beauty in all its manifestations. The illustration in the book is the children’s first encounter with the world of fine art. Complementing and deepening the content of a book, awakening in a child those feelings and emotions that a truly artistic work evokes in us, and, finally, enriching and developing their visual perception, the book illustration performs an aesthetic function.