Illustration

In our Specialism Art this term we are starting off on the topic of illustration and what illustration actually is and means to different people. We began by discussing where you may find illustrations and we decided that we would look at books, but what type of books had illustrations in them? As a class we came up with answers such as picture books, children's books, and illustrated books.

We then were asked by Sadie (Lecturer) to consider where we may find these type of books? Whereabouts would you go looking within a school to find illustrated books? Answers that came out through discussion were in reading corners of classrooms, libraries, and reception classes as illustrated books or picture books are generally found in classes where children may struggle to read and therefore rely on the pictures to tell the story. But I don't think that this should be the case as picture books often contain beautiful illustrations which could be used as a basis for an art project, for English when creating stories and poems as a stimulus and even just for older children who will be able to appreciate the work that has gone into the images to look at.

Through further discussion we had the question "Why do we have illustrated children's books?" put to us by Sadie and this made us think really about what the purpose of illustrated books were... We came up with answers such as:

-> assisting english as an additional language pupils 

or special educational needs students

-> to provide context

-> in assisting to help with learning to read

-> to promote creativity

-> promotes artistic creativity

-> to further knowledge

-> to help question things as pictures promote discussion

-> shows emotion and promotes exploration of new vocabulary and imagination

We then talked about how illustrated books help children and came up with things such as:

makes reading a positive experience

has importance to a child's development

offers children the opportunity to look at and talk about the pictures 

stimulating language development and auditory discrimination 

it gives children the skill of learning how to hold a book and turn pages

shows shapes and symbols have meaning

helps develop storytelling

To begin with we started off by looking at a book called 'Ish by Peter Reynolds' which has a range of illustrations and we looked at how the illustrator convays emotions and copied some images from illustrated books. 

Here are photos of my attempts...

We then went on to sketching out one another using the illustration techniques from copying the pictures. I liked trying out illustration and found copying easy enough but then sketching out my friends faces I found harder as I have found I'm not very good in my opinion at drawing boys so the illustration of Callum personally I do not like.