February 21, 2023

What’s illustration for?

There are plenty of reasons given, all over the internet, for what illustration is for. The historical one – it was for ‘illuminating’ text. The more modern ones – It’s for emphasising a message, adding a uniqueness to the ‘content’, it helps to convey an emotion.

And, whilst all of those things are true for illustration, they’re also true for video or photography – other image-making mediums. So, what makes ‘illustration’ different?

The one that sticks out to me most is that illustration isn’t constrained by the physical or material world. A photograph is often generated from pre-existing forms. And yes, they can be abstract ones, but the thing needs to exist in physical form for light to be able to bounce off it and hit the film or digital sensor in the camera to create the image. The same goes for video.

But illustration? Well, it’s bound only by human imagination. It’s difficult to get a photo of an ant doing a handstand, but it’s easy to draw. It’s difficult to get a video of an emu riding a bike, but it’s easy to draw. It’s difficult to get a photographic image of a unicorn and monkey playing cards in heaven, but, you guessed it, it’s easy to draw.

And so, if the limit of illustration is imagination and nothing else, then, as illustrators, we owe it to ourselves to cultivate that imaginary world. And how do we do that? Well, it’s proven that physical repetitive tasks work. Quiet time and ‘being bored’ works. Reading widely and seeking novel (and sometimes frightening) experiences works.

Writers can draw pictures in the mind with their words – and that is its own brand of magic. But, as they say, a picture says a thousand words and so words are not particularly efficient for describing images, most of the time.

Maybe, our job as illustrators, is to render the impossible so that others may use our cultivated, rich imaginations to cultivate their own. Imagine what’s possible if 7 billion humans start to imagine their own never before imagined universes. What might that mean for us and our species? For those of us who can contribute, that duty beckons.

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