WEEK 7.1: Illustration

1. What defines 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. Historically, book illustration and magazine/newspaper illustrations have been the predominant forms of this type of visual art, although illustrators have also used their graphic skills in the fields of poster art, advertisements, comic books, animation art, greeting cards, cartoon-strips. Most illustrative drawings were done in pen-and-ink, charcoal, or metal point, after which they were replicated using a variety of print processes including: woodcuts, engraving, etching, lithography, photography and halftone engraving, among others. Today, one might say there are five main types of illustrations: educational "information graphics" (eg. scientific textbooks); literary (eg. children's books); fantasy games and books; media (magazines, periodicals, newspapers); and commercial (advertising posters, point of sale, product packaging). Many of these illustrations are designed and created using computer graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and CorelDRAW, as well as Wacom tablets, although traditional methods like watercolor, pastels, casein, egg tempera, wood engraving, linoleum cuts, and pen and ink are also employed. There is an ongoing debate as to whether illustration is best categorized as a fine art, an applied art - or even a decorative art. However, looking at many of the illustrative masterpieces created through the ages, one can have no doubt that this artform ranks comfortably alongside other fine arts like painting and sculpture.

2. Illustration vs fine art

• Fine art is a creative piece of art made by an artist, a painter or a sculptor and is exhibited in an art show for sale.

• Illustration refers to works of art that appeal to the human eye like drawings and paintings commissioned for reproduction in print or other media. This is the main difference between illustration and fine art.

• Drawings that appear in children’s magazines, family magazines, and newspapers are all called illustrations.

• Fine art and illustration differ from each other in terms of the purpose of their creation. Fine art is created for imaginative or aesthetic purposes. Illustrations are created to be printed.

3. Art piece

It’s a picture that take at a place that I went to for my research zone.

4. The process

The lecturer gave us different kind of clothes to create an unconventional media materials without using any drawing or painting tool. I found that it’s very amusing to make a picture with clothes in different colours and materials. I decided to do this is because I always wanted to create a human face with clothes and this is the chance for me, so why not just have a try? At the end, I felt that my skin tone colour is a bit dark because there didn’t have the colour I want, therefore I looked like a tanned girl in the picture. And also the details and the faces part are more harder to make them out.

References:

Illustration History, Types, Characteristics. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/illustration.htm

Difference Between Fine Art and Illustration. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-fine-art-and-vs-illustration/amp/