Picture-book illustrations for children mainly are all about storytelling serially. More or less, we all believe that a picture is genuinely worth a thousand words. Now the question is, which thousand words will your series of illustrations tell the audience? And will the illustrations tell the same story the text has already articulated in multiple words? Anyway, the answer to these questions is both yes and no, to completely different degrees. Illustrations for children is a sophisticated and complex form of art that is typically fraught with a responsibility to the author and readers, and with certain serious pitfalls for the illustrators who tend to create interesting illustrations. Today’s blog brought to you by a reputed Children’s Book Illustration company in Chicago considers three ways an illustrator can go astray while creating illustrations for children.
1. Making illustrations that repeat text:
One of the most common pitfalls for an amateur illustrator is to make an illustration that repeats what the text is saying with words. This is because literal illustration freezes the illustration in time. As a result, it does not allow the readers to engage with the storyline, figure out its meaning, or anticipate forward into what might follow next. Apart from that, the literal illustration also captures a lot of precious space in a children’s book.
2. Illustrations that attach too much narrative:
Another usual mistake done by illustration designers is striving to pack too much information into the illustrations. However, filling the illustrations with detail is not a bad thing at all, but doing so has inherent pitfalls for illustration designers. An illustrator can become side-tracked by too many unnecessary details and might then become derailed by building in a mini-narrative to narrate the details of those details. Note that, a page filled with nonessential visual information that has little to do with the storyline, muddies the original theme, distracts the reader from the story, and moreover, disrespects the author’s intention of conveying the message.
3. Making too conceptual illustrations:
When making illustrations, you need to keep in mind who is your target audience. So, if you are making illustrations for children’s books where the main target audience is tiny kiddos, illustrations that are too conceptual will be baseless. This is because children cannot understand or figure out the message that a too-conceptual illustration represents in front of them. Remember that the most important role of an illustration is primarily for subconscious and preconscious emotional effect, and secondarily for the concept when it comes to child readers.
So, after analyzing the three points above, we would suggest you hire a professional Children’s Book Illustration company in Chicago to avoid such pitfalls.
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