Guide to Illustration: 5 Types of Illustration Art

Illustration is the art of creating imagery to accompany a text or explain a concept. There are many illustration styles suitable to different formats—from magazines to children’s books to comic books. As with other art styles, illustration has evolved with technology. Expanding on the style of hand-drawn traditional illustrations, computers now allow illustrators to create digital art. Both traditional and digital illustrations can be expressive and practical, serving to decorate and clarify a written work.

Today, many artists define traditional illustration techniques as those popularized by the printing press before modern computers. The printing press allowed for mass distribution and consumption, and computers helped to enable digital art. While all fitting into one category, these types of traditional illustration style are pretty distinct from each other:

1. 1. Woodcutting: This ancient illustration style involves carving a line drawing into wood, then rolling the surface of the wood with ink. Pressing the woodcutting onto paper imprints an image.
2. 2. Etching: Metal etching is a process that dates back to the early 1500s. To create a metal etching, an artist covers a metal plate with an acid-resistant waxy ground and uses an etching needle to scratch lines through the wax. The artist then dips the plate into an acidic bath, creating grooves in the exposed metal. When the plate is inked and wiped, ink remains in the etched line drawings; the plate then goes through a printing press, and the paper picks up the etched lines to create prints.
3. 3. Lithography: Lithography, a process that originated around the end of the eighteenth century, involves drawing images in wax, oil, or fat onto smooth, lithographic plates of limestone. Today, offset lithography, or offset printing, is a mass-production printing technique where text and images on metal plates are offset to rubber rollers and then onto paper for printing.
4. 4. Pencil drawing: The texture of graphite and the crispness of a pencil line can create beautiful illustrations. Shading and line weight are factors that make a pencil illustration spring to life, whether it’s a rough sketch or a detailed portrait.

With the help of programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, artists can create digital illustrations in a range of styles. Many digital art programs allow you to pick up different tools—computerized pencils, paint brushes, erasers, and more—and adjust their weight and color to create freehand digital illustrations. Freehand digital illustrations made with a tablet and stylus are an efficient way to play with preset brushes and colors.

Design software also allows artists to work with vector graphics—digital lines and shapes that can be scaled without losing quality. Graphic designers heavily rely on vector art because of this scalability. Vector art does not suffer from pixelation when adapted to varying sizes, making it a popular choice for creating logos, infographics, and other brand-based media.

Illustration is an art form with many practical applications.

1. 1. Book illustrations: Whether on book covers or in children’s books, eye-catching illustrations inform tone, character, and style. Illustrations help readers understand the personality of individual characters, and these designs can become part of the iconography that defines a culture.
2. 2. Concept art: Concept art is often employed in films or video games based on fantasy and animation. In concept art, artists draft different styles (or concepts) of a fictional world, creating unique character designs to let the creative team decide which best fits the story at hand.
3. 3. Comic books: The works in comic books showcase the potential of illustrations to create iconic characters and textured worlds. Graphic novels employ illustrations and use comic strips as a way to tell stories.
4. 4. Manga: This type of Japanese graphic novel is marked by its diversity of styles. Visually, manga can take a number of different forms. Design processes vary depending on the studio, artist, and story.
5. 5. Logos: A logo can be the visual representation of a company or brand. Clear, specific, and instantly recognizable, logos are more than just marketing tools—they are also a graphic designer’s creation that showcases the color palette of a brand and defines its visual vocabulary.

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