Four common mistakes made by picture-book illustrators
Picture-book illustration is about storytelling. We all know the truism that a picture is worth a thousand words. The question is, which thousand words will your illustration tell? Will you tell the same story the text has already articulated? Will you add narrative elements of your own to extend the meaning? The answer to these questions is both yes and no, in varying degrees. Picture-book illustration is a sophisticated and complex art-form fraught with responsibility to author and readers, and with pitfalls for the illustrator. This blog considers four ways an illustrator can go astray, plus four tips to help stay on track.
There is nothing like a mystery door with stairs for adding interest and anticipation to an illustration. This picture tells us both ‘what is’ and what ‘might be’. Add to the textual narrative by creating curiosity about what happens next. Illustration by Maya Kastelic, “A Boy and a House”.
Mistake 1: Illustration that repeats the text
A common pitfall for an early-career illustrator is to draw an illustration that repeats what the text is saying. If the text says someone is smiling while lifting a spoon to their mouth (which, by the way, is a common picture-book writing mistake!), then the illustration mistake would be to draw the person smiling and lifting a spoon to their mouth. If the text states that someone ‘says’ something, the illustration mistake is to draw the character with their mouth open as if speaking, and/or making a hand gesture as if uttering that sentence.
Literal illustration freezes the illustration in time. It doesn’t allow viewers to engage with the story, ponder its meaning, cast their minds back to an imagined previous moment, or anticipate forward into what might follow. Literal interpretation in illustration is to draw a diagram, not tell a story.
Literal illustration also wastes precious picture-book space. Picture books are short and must demonstrate a theme, unfold a plot and encapsulate character in around 14 double-page illustrations. The minimal texts and limited space carry a heavy narrative load, so it is a waste of every kind of resource (including print and paper costs) to repeat in the image what has already been succinctly encapsulated in text. Add to the story rather than replicate it.
Literal illustration is furthermore a discourtesy to the reader: he or she is smarter than you think, and was most likely born with a massive, inbuilt brain-capacity able to understand visual alongside textual cues. Give your reader illustrations that add richness and layers to the story.
TIP #1: avoid illustrating a literal repeat of the text (unless your brief expressly requires it).
Mistake 2: Illustration that adds too much narrative
Another common illustration mistake is striving to pack too much information into the illustrations. Filling the image with detail isn’t a bad thing, but doing so has inherent pitfalls. An illustrator can become side-tracked by details, and then by details of details, and might then become derailed by building in a mini-narrative to explain the details of those details. The next thing you know, a page has been inadvertently filled with nonessential visual information that has little to do with the story, muddies the theme, distracts the reader and disrespects the author’s intention.
How do you know if you have illustrated a step too far? An excellent rule of thumb is to ask yourself exactly how each detail highlights the theme and emotion of that moment in the story. Your answer to yourself must be brief and simple. If you come up with a long and complex answer by way of twists and turns and a whole new story, you have probably overstepped. For example, interesting piles of kitchen clutter in a story about a busy person can help to underscore a theme of ‘what happens when we spread ourselves too thin’. But a cat marching across the picture with a suitcase and an entourage of lizards may be more of a distraction, unless the theme is ‘when we spread ourselves too thin, we start to lose touch with reality’.
Overall, respect the author’s intention and add anything that highlights, enhances, expands and illuminates that intention. The full extent of your imagination is the limit … but within limits.
TIP #2: illustrate to enhance meaning
Less is often more. You can avoid over-illustrating by deliberately under-illustrating.
Illustrations by Julia Sarda.
Mistake 3: Illustration that is too conceptual
How much concept is too much concept in a picture-book illustration? A certain amount of concept is needed for an illustration to make sense. Without concept an illustration would tend toward pure abstraction (which can also work, if done right). But too much focus on concept can distort meaning by turning a united whole into a list of parts, and when an illustration becomes a list of parts it might as well be text.
The ideal illustration has an overall ‘wham’ effect on the reader. An effective illustration makes full use of the principles and elements of design, and manipulates composition to shepherd the reader’s emotional responses along the narrative arc. The role of illustration is primarily for subconscious and preconscious emotional effect, and secondarily of concept.
TIP #3: avoid over-conceptualising
Mistake 4: Illustration that doesn’t ‘work to the brief’ (or not being a team player)
The day-to-day reality of working as a picture-book illustrator can seem lonesome and isolated, but it also involves working with a team. Illustrating picture books means following the author’s lead as well as adding your own vision. It entails following the instructions of an editor, art director and book designer. To manage this range of input while retaining originality means an illustrator needs to be resilient. She needs to be both a team player and an individual operator.
The pitfall of having a strong individual approach is to topple from originality to wilfulness. Originality entails a fresh way of looking at a familiar thing. Wilfulness can end up by creating something inconsequential. An editor may decide a story needs sombre illustrations to convey the seriousness of an issue. The illustrator, on the other hand, having illustrated page after page of sombreness, may introduce a small clown or two at the crisis point, just to lighten things up. Or the illustrator may have a signature frog she insists on including in every image, against the sage advice of an editor and the wishes of the author. The frog may be witty and even ravishingly beautiful, but the reader will soon learn to look for the frog rather than follow the emotional flow of the story. In neither case is reader’s needs being respectfully served.
I have found that the best illustrators are able to take on an instruction, incorporate it and then extend it. They know how to let go, pivot and move on, no matter what stage of the process they are at. They know how to create something bigger and better and fresher than the original instruction, but without deviating from it. Their revised work adheres to and moves beyond the brief, it is in line with the theme, the emotion of the story and with the author’s intention, even while it moves further and beyond anything the author and editor combined could have imagined. An illustrator who manages this combination of community- and individual-mindedness throughout the illustration process is an illustrator who will continue to be offered work.
TIP #4: remain a team player throughout the process
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