This blog post explores the background behind picture book illustration evolving beyond simple illustrations into an independent art form, examining the changing expression techniques and meanings throughout this process.
The pictures in picture books are called illustrations to distinguish them from pure painting. The term ‘illustration’ comes from the verb ‘illustrate,’ meaning “to explain with examples.” In picture books, illustrations explain the story being told. For a long time, picture books were books read aloud by adults to children who hadn’t yet learned to read, and illustrations were used as decorative elements. During this period, illustrations were viewed merely as simple visual aids to the story, serving only to help children understand the narrative more easily.
However, it was after World War II that illustrations, once just tools, began to take on a leading role, allowing picture books to develop significantly into their own distinct genre. Alongside societal changes after the war, the role of picture books also transformed, and illustrations began to be recognized as an independent art form, moving beyond being merely an auxiliary to the story. The pictures evolved into important artistic tools that not only visually expressed the story’s content but also stimulated the reader’s emotions and sparked their imagination. Today, the illustrations within picture books not only increasingly possess strong painterly elements but also transcend the limitations that once denied them artistic significance due to their purpose of explaining the story. The better the illustration, the richer the story. The illustrations harmoniously integrated within a single picture book create a multidimensional work.
Picture book illustrations now hold meaning beyond mere decoration. What defines a good picture book? It is one where the spatiality of painting and the temporality of film meet concisely with language to create rich imagery. Here, beyond simple story delivery, space is provided for readers to discover new meanings through pictures and text and imagine their own stories. It is a book woven from pictures that meticulously fulfill the descriptions and narratives omitted within the text. Hidden within the picture book, awaiting the reader’s active participation in seeking new relationships between what is drawn and what is not, lies a careful consideration of how text and images are combined.
A drawing rendered with thin lines that seem to break and reconnect, appearing somewhat passive and hesitant. Illustrations that seem poised to soar powerfully with their fluid drawing. Images that visually convey a character’s despair, as if deliberately ruined by lines scribbled with a marker pen. Pictures of snow-covered scenes, rendered with charcoal smudged on a white background to create a hazy effect. The more you look into this kind of picture book, the more fascinating it becomes. The illustrations themselves convey the story, and their diverse visual elements stimulate the reader’s imagination, inviting exploration of the varied meanings embedded within the pictures. This is because the images themselves are rich with emotion conveyed to the viewer.
Furthermore, some picture books feature backgrounds that are almost entirely white or white with faint colors, and lines depicting objects are either thick and bold or sharp yet heavily broken. Where even those broken lines fade away, light appears. This light envelops each illustration like an aurora, bringing it to life. Imagination and contemplation fill the space created by the reduction of words. This principle is also seen in architectural design, particularly in the versatile transformation of space among elements like form, decoration, and spatial arrangement.
Therefore, a good picture book is not one where illustrations are added to completed text, but one where text and images jointly complete the story. In such picture books, text and images do not exist independently; they complement each other’s roles and interact. Within existing paints, non-existent colors are created, and when line meets line, color meets color, or line meets color, unexpected things happen on the canvas. The British painter Francis Bacon once said, “While painting, all sorts of forms and directions, unrelated to the painting itself, somehow appear out of nowhere, beyond my expectations.” Reading a picture book means reaching beyond the concepts or subjects written in words to touch and converse with the unknown.
