5 inspirations from folk art for picture-book illustrators

Indigenous folk art of the Warli people of India.

I was inspired to write this blog because so many aspiring illustrators strive to achieve a generic style that hovers somewhere on the outskirts of not-quite-traditional-realism.

But there is already a wealth of generic illustration out there, and publishers aren’t looking for more of the same.

What publishers are looking for are illustrations that are fresh and new and distinctive.

This is why I often encourage aspiring illustrators to throw realism and traditionalism (a.k.a. genericism) to the wind and instead embrace the freer, livelier, more vivid and impactful style that folk art offers.

So what actually is folk art?

Traditional folk art

The purpose of traditional folk art is generally to express the identity of a community or to express culture. It is rarely, if ever, practiced for individual aggrandisement or profit.

Traditional folk art also tends to be utilitarian and decorative, transforming everyday objects into something more special, investing them with cultural significance or consecrating them.

Depending on the culture, folk art is used to decorate houses, domestic artefacts, tools, weapons, farm equipment and clothing. Its practitioners use a recognisable palette of colours, materials, motifs and patterns.

Traditional Norwegian rose-painting (“painted with a rose”) decorates the entire interior of a living space, including walls, ceilings, furnishings. Different regions in Norway have different signature styles, though rose-painting is also a nationally distinctive form.

Sometimes folk art has the purpose of telling traditional stories, or describing the daily life of a community (such as the Warli image above). At other times folk art seeks to please and invoke deity, or to ward off evil.

Once upon a time traditional folk art was created mainly by peasants, artisans and tradespeople. It has historically been seen as a ‘low’ form of art because of its naïve style and the absence of formal rules of proportion and perspective.

However, European post-impressionists and those that followed them borrowed liberally from the techniques of folk art.

Picasso discovered that successful subversion of the formal rules of proportion and perspective - not to mention of scale and composition and colour - took years to perfect.

Not so ‘low’, after all . . .

Which brings us to contemporary folk art.

What is contemporary folk art?

Cats in the Snow by Morris Hirshfield (1872–1946), a Polish American ‘outsider artist’ whose use of repetition and pattern has become a common feature of contemporary picture-book illustration. Read more about Hirshfield here Morris Hirshfield | MoMA

Sometimes called ‘primitivism’, and sometimes categorised under the banner of Surrealism, contemporary folk-art is also sometimes known as ‘outsider art’ and ‘naïve art’.

A key assumption regarding contemporary folk art is that the artists are self taught. The ‘outsider’ term therefore refers to artists who operate outside the mainstream spaces of art training, production, and exhibition.

That said, the work of many outsider artists is enthusiastically embraced by major mainstream galleries. The work of Henry Darger, an ‘outsider artist’ in the extreme, whose personal story is only barely less mind-boggling than his art, is held at MoMA in New York.

An illustration from The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion by Henry Darger (1892–1973), a reclusive Chicago janitor who left behind a massive trove of fiction and illustration that he had never shown anyone.

There is an unselfconscious simplicity - that some are pleased to call naivete - to both traditional and contemporary folk art.

The forms and motifs and patterns are standardised, and while one practitioner may have a finer eye and steadier hand than others, there is no attempt to further develop or change or improve upon what has been established and accepted for that particular style or form.

5 inspirations of traditional folk-art

While it isn’t appropriate to copy art styles that belong to specific cultures and peoples, especially not in the pursuit of our own profit and glory, the incorporation of fundamental folk-art elements can transform a generic image into a distinctive and original illustration.

Illustration from Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins. Hutchins used widely different illustration styles for different books, but here she uses several distinctive elements of folk art: limited palette, simple geometric forms, repeatable motifs, pattern and decoration.

Here are five key elements of folk art that can help transform any illustration style:

1. Traditional folk-art uses distinct, recognisable symbols. Developing your own visual vocabulary of distinct shapes and symbols can make your illustration easily recognisable.

2. Traditional folk art reduces objects to their simplest flat shapes – square, circle, triangle. Rather than trying to mimic reality (or realist illustration), use simple shapes in place of realism. Simple shapes and forms will make your illustration style bolder and more vivid.

3. Folk art uses easily reproducible shapes and images. Using repeated familiar shapes and forms removes the struggle for realism, offers greater freedom of expression, and allows you to incorporate pattern and repetition into your illustration.

4. Traditional folk art styles use a restrained or limited palette. Limiting your palette gives your work overall cohesion as well as making it more instantly recognisable.

5. Folk art plays with distortions of perspective, space, scale and proportion. Deliberately refusing to obey the rules of perspective can have a far more pleasing effect than attempted but not-quite-right perspective. Once perspective is tossed out the window, you are free to use the space on your page however you like. Read more about perspective in illustration in my blog 3 ways with perspective in picture-book illustration

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