Illustration from first sketch to press-ready file: choosing media, mixing color, controlling line quality, scanning and cleaning artwork, CMYK conversion and printer specifications. Commission practice and pricing appear too. For illustrators working professionally and for anyone drawing seriously at home.
A plain-English guide to what illustration is, how it differs from fine art and graphic design, and why the borders between them are blurrier than job titles suggest.
Shorter days, a lower sun and leaves that turn for a reason — what the season actually does to light and colour, and how to build it into your illustrations.
From picture books to packaging labels, here is who commissions illustration, what each kind of job asks of the artist, and how the money arrives.
A guide to the speckled, mineral-flecked textures that appear when certain pigments settle unevenly across the page, and how illustrators put the effect to work.
Gouache dries flat, opaque and matte yet rewets with water, which is why studios from the mid-century print era to the 2020s keep reaching for it.
A cover illustrator solves problems of genre, scale and typography before any paint is mixed, because a jacket must survive the size of a thumbnail.
Illustrated maps trade cold precision for character, and a new generation of artists is drawing British towns the way memory holds them.
Licensing sells permission rather than the picture itself, and every fee rests on usage, territory, duration and exclusivity.
British illustration runs from the wood-engraved satire of Punch in 1841 to the scrollable feeds of the 2010s, with wit as the connecting thread.
A botanical plate shows every diagnostic feature of a species in one ideal composite, which is exactly what a photograph of a single specimen cannot manage.