Illustration

An illustration is a visualization or a depiction made by an artist, such as a drawing, sketch, painting, photograph, or other kind of image of things seen, remembered or imagined, using a graphical representation.

A fashion illustration

Quotes

19th century

• "What is the use of a book", thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
  • Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), ch. 1

• Why did you make the Lady of Shalott, in the illustration, with her hair wildly tossed about as if by tornado? ... I didn’t say that her hair was blown about like that ... Why did you make the web wind round and round her like the threads of a cocoon? ... I did not say it floated round and round her.
  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson to William Holman Hunt (c. 1888–1905), reported in W. H. Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905)

20th century

• A good illustrator may draw from models but knows how to forget them.
  • Art Young, His Life and Times (1939)

• To illustrate any text is also to interpret it.
  • Alison Lurie, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups (1990)

• Beatrix Potter portrayed the world from a mouse’s- or rabbit’s- or small child’s-eye view. The vantage point in her exquisite watercolors varies from a few inches to a few feet from the ground, like that of a toddler.
  • Alison Lurie, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups (1990)

• Can you imagine illustration in modern novels? ... For instance, in Norman Mailer? They would have to be abstracts. Don’t you think? Sort of barbed wire and blotches?
  • Alice Munro, Open Secrets (1994)

21st century

• Illustration is a very old form, far older than the novel, balanced somewhere in between painting and literature but belonging to neither.
  • Shirley Hughes, A Life Drawing (2002)

• I cannot imagine how it must feel for an author to see someone else’s interpretation of their own inner vision. I am constantly amazed at how appreciative most of them manage to be.
  • Shirley Hughes, A Life Drawing (2002)