Yann Kebbi, Mouvement.

About the Author

Martin Salisbury is Professor of Illustration at the Cambridge School of Art,
where he designed the renowned MA Children’s Book Illustration
programme. He has previously chaired the international jury at the Bologna
Children’s Book Fair, and his books include One Hundred Great Children’s
Picturebooks (2015), The Illustrated Dust Jacket: 1920–1970 (2017,
Thames & Hudson) and Miroslav Šašek (Illustrators series, 2021, Thames &
Hudson).
 Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
The Illustrated Dust Jacket: 1920–1970
Martin Salisbury

Drawing: A Complete Guide

Stephen C. P. Gardner

Comics Sketchbooks: The Unseen World of Today’s Most

Creative Talents
Steven Heller

Be the first to know about our new releases, exclusive content and
author events by visiting
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
www.thamesandhudson.com.au
A sheet of developmental studies for narrative book illustrations by Charles Edmund Brock.
 CONTENTS

Introduction

1 Drawing and Illustration

Drawing: What is it?
Illustration: What is it?
Isabelle Arsenault: Drawing and me
Drawing and the education of the illustrator
Edward Ardizzone and Lynton Lamb: ‘Born’ or ‘true’?

2 The Basics
Learning to see
Tools and materials
Line
Tone
Using line to suggest tone
Mark-making and printmaking
Christopher Brown: Drawing for linocut
Composition and structure
Perspective
Drawing and colour
Vyara Boyadjieva: Line, form, colour
People and environments
Drawing animals
Drawing and photography

3 From Observation to Imagination

From observation to imagination
Drawing from memory
Yann Kebbi: An organic approach
Simon Bartram: Monday Man
Bill Bragg: Making the links
Sketchbooks, visual journals and doodles
John Vernon Lord: The journals
Sally Dunne: Sketchbooks and me
Alexis Deacon: Drawing, thinking and the psychology of ‘finished’

4 Drawing and Applied Illustration

Drawing and applied illustration

Editorial and magazine illustration
David Humphries: Newton’s Cradle or ‘the biggest hum’
Book illustration
Evelyn Dunbar: Lyrical non-fiction
Pablo Auladell: La Feria Abandonada
Character development
Fifi Kuo and Ellie Snowdon: Approaches to animal character
Axel Scheffler: The evolution of a personal visual vocabulary
Atmosphere and fantasy
Victoria Turnbull: Authorial flights of fancy
Sheila Robinson: The Twelve Dancing Princesses
Authorial graphic storytelling
Isabel Greenberg: Glass Town
Jon McNaught: Quiet visual drama
Advertising and display
Kerry Lemon: Sketchbook to hoarding
Frank Newbould: Eliminating detail
Humour
Paul Slater: Master of the absurd
Reportage and graphic commentary
David Hughes: Covid diary
Robert Weaver: The bare essentials
John Minton: Reportage for advertising
Illustration and photography

Postscript: A Word About Style

Bibliography
Picture Credits
Acknowledgments
Index
 Introduction
‘One of the difficulties inherent in using words to write
or speak about drawing is the fact that, ultimately,
drawing is itself a language’

Drawing remains the fundamental language of the illustrator, and an equally

fundamental aspect of illustration’s research and preparation. In its many
guises and meanings, ‘drawing’ continues to feed and underpin the output of
the successful illustrative artist, even if it is not the actual method used to
create the work. It is drawing, and the understanding or ‘knowing’ that it
nurtures, which informs convincing illustrative image-making in all its forms.
In 1962 the illustrator and painter Lynton Lamb published Drawing for
Illustration with Oxford University Press. It was an important contribution to
the understanding of the illustrator’s art and craft at the time. Analysis of the
various print processes through which illustrators’ original artworks found
their way to the printed page inevitably formed a significant proportion of
Lamb’s text, as did the need to be able to work to a particular scale. From the
invention of printing until around the time when Lamb wrote his text, it had
been paramount for illustrators to have a full understanding of these
processes. In shamelessly stealing the title of Lamb’s excellent book, I hope
to further illuminate the subject in the context of today’s publishing
industries, in a world much changed.
This is not strictly speaking an instructional book, and it is certainly not
one that reveals miraculous tricks or short-cuts, but the aim is nevertheless
that it may help students and others to develop their drawing specifically in
relation to the art of illustration, while also gaining some broader insights
into historical context. It is important to stress at the outset that I do not
believe there is a particular ‘way’ of drawing for illustration, certainly not in
the stylistic sense. But there are certain differences in approach to drawing
between, on the one hand, the narrative or interpretative artist and on the
other, the formal analytical draughtsman.
 One of the difficulties inherent in using words to write or speak about
drawing is the fact that, ultimately, drawing is itself a language. As the
illustrator and painter John Minton pointed out in his lecture ‘Speculations on
the Contemporary Painter’(City of Birmingham Scool of Painting, 1952), ‘a
Cézanne cannot be described, if it could there would have been no need for it
to have been painted’. The language of drawing goes beyond description. In
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Faber, 1937), T. S. Eliot,
writing about poetry rather than drawing, speculated that the chief use of
‘meaning’ in this context is often ‘to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep
his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much
as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a nice piece of meat for
the house-dog.’ It was an idea that the philosopher Marshall McLuhan
famously developed: ‘For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece
of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’, which
he condensed into the phrase ‘the medium is the message’. There are clear
parallels between the languages of poetry and drawing, each being formally
subject to certain underlying mechanics or ‘grammar’, but (with the
exception of purely technical or informational drawing) with ‘meaning’ being
readable in a variety of ways.
A preparatory sketch and final printed illustration by H. M. Brock from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s
Breakfast Table series, books of essays published in the early 1900s.

When Lamb wrote Drawing for Illustration, the relationship between

drawing and illustration was perhaps more straightforward than it is now. In
many ways, illustration was drawing. Certainly, most published illustration
was originally executed in ink on paper. Drawing formed the basis of
teaching in the art schools of the day, in all fields of the ‘fine’ and applied
arts. For the illustrator, these acquired skills were largely employed in
making visual the writer’s text, at a time when illustration was generally seen
as entirely subordinate to the written word.
In the twenty-first century, illustration’s connection to both formal
drawing and the written word have changed considerably. Illustrators are
increasingly creating their own content as graphic novelists, picturebook-
makers, documentary artists: ‘picture-writers’, if you will. The teaching of
drawing in the most formal, academic sense is, however, increasingly rare.
Until relatively recently it had been seen as the foundation stone of learning
across all of the visual arts. Now, in the absence of such formal training, the
relationship between drawing and the activity of illustration varies greatly
from one illustrator to another.
The relationship between fine art and illustration has itself long been a
prickly one. In his book, Lamb quoted John Berger’s famous observation that
‘drawing without searching equals illustration’. Berger was referring to the
most literal definition of the word, but illustration has always been easy
game for such put-downs, possibly more so in recent times as fine art has
moved away from any direct relationship with formal drawing skills and has
therefore perhaps needed to find other ways to identify itself as of a higher
purpose.
The vacuum in drawing-based expressive art is being filled by the
growth in authorial visual narrative texts, as practised by a generation of
expressive artist–authors such as Isabelle Arsenault, Jillian Tamaki, Shaun
Tan, Isabel Greenberg, John Broadley, Jon McNaught and Brian Selznick.
And, of course, the great works by children’s picturebook-makers are
becoming increasingly recognized within literature and the arts.
Examining the various ways in which the process and activity of drawing
underpins, directs and supports the work of such artists as these, as well as
their historical predecessors, is the key theme of this book.
Lynton Lamb’s 1962 book Drawing for Illustration examined the practical and conceptual skills of the
illustrator at a time when they needed to work much more closely with the craftsmen responsible for
reproducing their work.
Stanley Badmin was a prolific and influential illustrator and tutor throughout much of the twentieth
century. Badmin was known for the intensity of detail in his work, much of which focused on the
English landscape. For this 1959 Christmas card design, Christmas Week, Trafalgar Square, his pencil
rough appears to include preliminary colour tests for the dark night sky.
 CHAPTER 1

Drawing and Illustration

 Drawing: What is it?
‘Learning to think visually is the key to learning to
draw’

As with so many areas of the creative arts, arriving at a precise definition of

‘drawing’ is challenging and, perhaps, ultimately not entirely meaningful.
Definitions usually include get-out clauses or qualifications, because the
boundaries between drawing and painting, for example, are inevitably
porous. Attempts to tie down the word can easily become either too inclusive
or too exclusive. And, after all, artists are not known primarily for their
interest in following rules or being bound by conventions or definitions.
Nevertheless, if we take the Tate’s simple, pragmatic definition, we can
build outwards from it:
Drawing is essentially a technique in which images are depicted on
a surface by making lines, though drawings can also contain tonal
areas, washes and other non-linear marks.
Purposely avoiding straying into debate about at what point (if at all) random
or accidental mark-making becomes ‘drawing’, my own best efforts at
defining drawing for illustration quickly become cumbersome:
Making intentional marks on a surface or through digital media to
represent and communicate a physical entity or an idea (or both).
The etymology of the word itself is rooted in the physical act of drawing
(dragging or pulling) an implement through or across the sand or soil, thereby
leaving a trace or trail. The word for drawing in other languages often has
completely different origins. In French and Italian, to draw and drawing are
expressed through the equivalent of the English word ‘design’ – dessiner and
dessin in French, disegnare and disegno in Italian – seemingly evolved
through focus on the planning and compositional aspects of drawing.
Coming to terms with the idea of drawing as a form of language is
important. Indeed, when learning to draw (which first of all necessitates
learning to see), one of the most powerful impediments to progress is the
brain’s insistent habit of trying to change seeing into words. Learning to think
visually is the key to learning to draw. This is one of the reasons why we
sometimes hear teachers of drawing suggest that drawing from observation is
less about learning and more about unlearning.
It may be worthwhile at this point to remind ourselves of how casually
we take for granted our ability to make the connection between a simple line
drawing of a thing, and the three-dimensional thing itself. After all, we don’t
all walk around with outlines around us. How did we learn to make the huge
and complex leap of the imagination that requires us to perceive a
representation of reality in the artifice of a linear contour that describes
where one thing ends and another begins? Some have argued that this must be
an inherent ability in humans. However, as the painter and art educationalist
Richard Carline noted in his 1968 book Draw They Must (Edward Arnold
Ltd), not all human beings have an innate ability to ‘read’ a representational
drawing. It has been suggested that the idea of representation through outline
may have its origins in the particular ancient cave drawings of early man that
were executed by placing one hand flat against the cave wall and using the
other to trace a line around the fingers.
This sketchbook drawing of card players in Sofia, Bulgaria, by Vyara Boyadjieva is executed almost
entirely in outline, yet we are able to read it clearly in terms of space and ‘who is in front of whom’.

Wherever the origins of the human impulse to draw lie, it seems clear
that it is powerful from a very early age. Very young children will ‘draw’
long before they have command of the spoken word. They will continue to do
so naturally and without inhibition until they reach an age when they first
become conscious of notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drawing, or the sense of
being judged on levels of representational realism. It is sadly at this point
that many children, unless they are fortunate enough to receive continued
encouragement, stop drawing. Pablo Picasso’s oft-quoted observation that ‘It
took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child’
may have contained more than a little sophistry, but it does touch on the
important matter of the relationships between concepts of skill or craft and
pure unbridled expression in drawing.
 Establishing a clear distinction between drawing and painting is not as
simple as it might at first seem. Such a distinction cannot realistically be
based on whether or not colour is used, or on particular media or materials.
It is possible to draw with colour and it is possible to paint in a linear
manner. Exploring this conundrum in A Short Book About Drawing
(Quadrille, 2013), Andrew Marr quotes the German sculptor and symbolist
Max Klinger, who proposed that, compared to painting, drawing has a ‘freer
relationship to the representable world’. Drawing is further away from the
illusion of real three-dimensional space and forces us to unconsciously make
connections, translate or ‘fill in the gaps’. Meanwhile, Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres is said to have opined, ‘Drawing includes three and a half
quarters of the content of painting…drawing contains everything, except the
hue’.
Each and every person will draw in their own unique way, whether
trained or untrained. Every mark made speaks differently – from nervous,
tentative, searching strokes to bold, gestural and direct mark-making,
sometimes all in the same image. Every little change in pressure or direction
will have a bearing on the character of each mark, in the same way that
variation in emphasis from pianissimo to fortissimo will convey different
meanings and experiences in orchestral music. Even where an artist has been
taught to draw in a rigorously academic manner, aspects of their own
personality, temperament and particular visual interests will force their way
through and be made manifest in the nature of the marks made. This process
of examining, exploring and questioning the visual world requires intense
concentration.
Paintings by early humans in caves such as those at Lascaux in France or Cueva de las Manos (Cave
of the Hands) in Patagonia, Santa Cruz, Argentina, shown here, frequently include the stencilling of
hands as well as multiple representations of the wild animals on which they preyed. Although there are
many theories about the ‘purpose’ of the drawings, humankind’s longstanding impulse to graphically
represent the three-dimensional world is evident.
This sketchbook sheet of observational studies of a clothed male figure was produced by an unknown
art student in the 1950s. The hesitancy and constant reassessment evident in the student’s line speaks of
the sense of inquiry that is so important when learning to draw.
Observational drawing has not only been the skill underpinning many painters’ processes, but the
technical means by which an original design was scaled up onto canvas for painting, as seen here in
Walter Sickert’s drawing and final painting, Ennui (1914). The pencil underdrawing can be clearly seen
in the sketch.
 Illustration: What is it?
‘The general standing of illustration as an art form has
fluctuated over the years, drifting repeatedly in and out
of fashion’

Given the changing role and status of illustration in recent years, the question
‘what is illustration?’ may be as difficult to pin down as ‘what is drawing?’
Traditionally, dictionary definitions have focused on the role of illustration in
explaining or elucidating, augmenting information that is primarily conveyed
by the written word. This aspect of illustration’s role remains an important
one, especially in fields such as technical and informational illustration. But
as illustration and fine or ‘high’ art grew further and further apart through the
second half of the twentieth century (with certain notable exceptions), many
artists, whose work was rooted in drawing and narrative and who wished to
express their own concepts and ideas in primarily visual form, found a home
in authorial, sequential visual work for reproduction. It is perhaps this latter
aspect that is the key to defining the word ‘illustration’.
Prior to the invention of printing, artists created illuminated manuscripts
by hand, delicately rendering word and image as a unified whole. They saw
their activity in holistic terms, as one of creating a book, rather than assigning
distinct roles of ‘writer’ and ‘illustrator’ or ‘artist’. But in the age of print, it
became accepted practice to label a book as ‘by’ the writer and to use the
term ‘illustrated by’ in relation to the creator of the book’s pictorial content.
With the growing incidence of what some term ‘visual text’, particularly in
the fast-evolving field of picturebook-making, such terminology is rapidly
becoming obsolete. In the instances where the word-maker and image-maker
of a picturebook are separate, they are essentially co-authors. Sometimes in
these situations, a book is the original concept of the artist and a writer is
commissioned to put the words together, thereby overturning the notion of
image as subordinate to the written word. Increasingly, we see picturebooks
that are credited as ‘by’ the artist alongside ‘words by’ the writer – a
reversal of traditional accreditation. Available terminology still, however,
often falls short in relation to areas of authorial visual communication such
as visual journalism, political satire and editorial comment. In 1976, The
World Illustration Awards began, demonstrating the increasing global reach
of this art form and recognizing work in fields from advertising to children’s
books. Other awards have followed, notably in the field of picturebook-
making – for example, the Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrators Competition,
run by the China Shanghai Children’s Book Fair since 2015.
Original artwork for Washington Square (1913) by William Glackens, showing the use of white
gouache or ‘body colour’ to add highlights and clean away unwanted detail in preparation for
photography for print.

Lynton Lamb’s 1962 attempt at defining illustration, ‘small drawings

designed to be printed in books as a comment on the author’s story’,
reminds us how much things have moved on (pp. 7–9). My own attempt may
well become similarly dated, perhaps even more quickly: ‘Imagery created,
singly or in sequence, to be reproduced for mass visual communication via
print or screen, with or without verbal text’. As Michael Lobel points out in
his book John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration (Yale University Press,
2014), it may be more useful to think of the word as an activity, rather than a
thing. Identifying the purpose behind the making of the image and examining
illustration as a profession may be more meaningful than trying to locate any
particular identifying visual characteristics. Lobel also notes that ‘illustrators
recognize that the images they create are meant to be viewed not in the
original but as reproductions’.
The general standing of illustration as an art form has fluctuated over the
years, drifting repeatedly in and out of fashion. Throughout the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first, editorials have presented
variations on a theme, lurching from ‘The End of Illustration’ to, within a few
years, ‘The Return of Illustration’, only to be followed shortly after by, for
example, ‘Illustration: Do we need it?’ The lowest point was possibly the
period around the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when
infatuation with the emerging technologies of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
and the like brought into question the need for, or role of, drawing in relation
to illustration. Initially, many graphic designers felt that they could take on
the role of illustrator by digitally importing, altering and collaging
photographic imagery. Newspapers and magazines were quickly awash with
this kind of work. Attitudes to illustration, especially in traditional media,
became negative and condescending. At least one leading visual
communication journal at the time openly declared that it would no longer
feature illustration within its pages.

‘For much of its history, illustration shared with fine art

a foundation in academic drawing’

In July 1996, the influential American illustrator Brad Holland proffered

his own somewhat sardonic definition of the distinction between illustration
and fine art in The Atlantic: ‘In Commercial Art, you find out how much
they’re going to pay you, and then you do the work. In Fine Art, it’s the
other way around’. He subsequently delivered a despairing if ironic rant on
the perceived status of the illustrator as ‘artist’ in his glossary of ‘key terms’
for illustrators:
‘That’s Not Art, That’s Illustration’: Almost Everybody is an artist
these days. Rock and Roll singers are artists. So are movie
directors, performance artists, make-up artists, tattoo artists, con
 artists, and rap artists. Movie stars are artists. Madonna is an
artist, because she explores her own sexuality. Snoop Doggy Dogg
is an artist because he explores other people’s sexuality. Victims
who express their pain are artists. So are guys in prison who
express themselves on shirt cardboard. Even consumers are artists
when they express themselves in their selection of commodities. The
only people left in America who seem not to be artists are
illustrators.
Holland’s words must have rung true for many an illustrator in 2000. In his
eyes, the illustrator was being punished for being a collaborative rather than
an individualistic or self-indulgent artist. Some would call this an excessive
inferiority complex. But illustration and fine art have a past.
For much of its history, illustration shared with fine art a foundation in
academic drawing. But even before the two parted ways it was rarely
possible for those whose primary aspirations were aimed towards the
gallery wall to maintain a practice as an illustrator without undermining their
credibility. Notwithstanding the mobility of mid-century British artist–
illustrator–designers such as Edward Bawden, Paul Nash and John Piper, the
stereotype of the illustrator as frustrated painter or fine artist clung rather
tenaciously, perhaps helped by the regret expressed by artists such as
Edward Hopper and N. C. Wyeth, who retrospectively played down the
importance of their illustration work. Yet as Richard McLanathan observes in
his introduction to The Brandywine Heritage (New York Graphic Society,
1971):
The fact of the matter is that American artists have traditionally
turned their hands to a variety of tasks as practicality or fancy
might dictate. The creative mind in America has never been
satisfied to follow those neatly defined channels of expression
which have characterized much of European art during recent
centuries.
Drawing by Michal Shalev.

As the twenty-first century entered its second decade, it was perhaps the
widening of awareness (in both public and academic arenas) of the potential
for the art of children’s picurebook-making and other authorial forms –
ironically along with the rise of digital reading tablets – that prompted yet
another switch in the fortunes of illustration. The ‘Tools of Change in
Publishing’ conference, held on the eve of the 2011 Bologna Children’s Book
Fair, was notable for its dire warnings of the imminent demise of the physical
children’s book. Failing to heed the lessons of illustration history, speaker
after speaker delivered prophesies of doom to an audience of petrified
publishers, confidently asserting that unless they immediately invested in the
design and production of ‘picturebook apps’ they would be quickly left
behind. After much money was lost, that which should have been clear at the
outset soon became evident: a book is a book and a game is a game. The
picturebook app came and went in the same manner as the legendary CD-
Rom. It was apparent that the physical book would need to ‘up its game’
somewhat in order to compete with digital reading, but this would primarily
involve greater focus on design and production – marking out the territory of
the book not just as a conveyor of information, but as a haptic, physical and
all-around aesthetic experience. Thus, we find ourselves once again in
something of a ‘Golden Age’ of book illustration and design.
 ‘Even today, making a drawing appear on a blank
sheet of paper is a bit like magic to me’

Isabelle Arsenault:
Drawing and me

Drawing has always been central to the practice of the award-

winning artist Isabelle Arsenault. Here, she reflects on its place in
her life and work.

Childhood
As a child, I was much impressed with my father’s ability to draw.
He didn’t work in a very creative field but, on occasion, to entertain
my brother, my sister and me, he would take out his pen from the
inside pocket of his business suit and grab a piece of paper to draw
on. A few lines later, a character would appear. There was
something mysterious and magical about it. Like when a magician
pulls a bird out of a sleeve. I believe that my interest in drawing
stems from there and, through my own illustrations, I have always
sought to create this kind of wonder. My father also taught me oil
painting. Secretly, I always tried to impress him with my creations.
It made me work hard and improve quickly. I was a fairly
introverted child and I felt that drawing was a way to show a hidden
side of me, some part within that was difficult to access otherwise.
Later, drawing became part of my identity. At school, I was
spontaneously associated with any project that required drawing
skills. This made me feel valued or special (like it was a
superpower) throughout my studies and pushed me to continue on
this path.

College
During my college years in fine arts, the approach was rather
classical: technical drawing classes, live models, still observation
and so on. It was during my university studies in Graphic Design
that I had the opportunity to further explore conceptual illustration.
The idea of drawing took on another meaning and found a kind of
purpose. There, a drawing had to be able to communicate a message
in a coherent way, to speak a clear visual language. Even today, this
perspective is useful to my work, especially when it comes to visual
storytelling. I also had to draw storyboards, which taught me the use
of visual sequences and how the images could work together to
create a whole. We were encouraged to try different approaches and
think outside the box to make our concepts unique and able to stand
out.

Drawing now
Drawing is very much associated with work for me now. It’s
intuitive because it’s something I do on a daily basis. But because
every project is different, one type of drawing may come more easily
to me during a certain period of time, when I am working on a
project of a particular style. This is why I think it is important to
maintain some form of practice outside of work, in a sketchbook for
example, to exercise what I have learned and explore new avenues.
It’s like training between marathons. If you’re not in good shape, it
becomes much more difficult to perform.
Sketchbook drawings by Isabelle Arsenault.
Developmental stages and finished page from Collette’s Lost Pet (Random House,
2017).
Sketchbook drawings by Isabelle Arsenault.
 Initial pencil composition and finished illustrations from Jane the Fox and Me (text
by Fanny Britt, Walker Books, 2014).

Observation
Observational drawing is all about shapes, light and shadows and reality
as we see it. Once we have mastered these concepts, it is possible to
deconstruct and select what we deem relevant, adapting reality to our
personal point of view. In my process, I like to pit realistically rendered
elements in opposition to others that are much less so. I build up images
based on knowledge and reality, then I shed the superfluous and open the
door to the reader, making room for pattern. When I was young, I liked
to lose myself in complex illustrations, full of details and characters. I
could spend hours like that, daydreaming, looking at books or
psychedelic vinyl covers. Even today, everything I see is somehow
transposed into textured materials when it comes to drawing: a mass of
branches on the ground becomes fine hatching, a leafy shrub turns into
a series of zig-zag lines. I find this style reflects the diversity that makes
our world so beautiful. But using lots of patterns can easily become
overwhelming. I try to focus on what truly brings something to the
image.

Planning and Execution

This is a fragile balance. At the sketch stage, I try to focus on the content
and not the container. My only concern is whether the message is getting
across well, if the pace is good, if the idea works. I just sketch the
elements minimally in their approximate place. If I push the rendering
too far, I’m afraid of setting up expectations and being stuck staying in
too narrow a frame. Whereas if the sketch remains open but
communicates the idea well, I can go in several different directions for
the final work, and it makes me more comfortable to try different
approaches, adjust things, leave room for spontaneity.

Drawing and Me
Drawing for me is still very much associated with childhood – mine, but
now also that of my own children. It implies being fully in the moment.
It is an act of spontaneity, a gesture of communion between the hand, the
eye and the brain. When that coordination is efficient, it’s exhilarating
and addicting. Therefore, it is almost a meditative activity that keeps me
focused on the here and now. Direct inner-observation, kind of.
Drawings are often perceived as incomplete, a process step before going
to a final piece. This aspect touches me. Its vulnerability makes it even
more precious. Even today, making a drawing appear on a blank sheet of
paper is a bit like magic to me.
 Drawing and the education of
the illustrator
‘Because of its perceived association with that slippery
concept, “skill” or craft, it has sometimes struggled to
find its place in academia’

Over many years of teaching drawing and illustration, I have become

increasingly aware of the ways in which ‘knowing’ emerges over time in the
process of drawing, at least initially from direct observation. Applications to
art schools have traditionally involved students having to attend portfolio
interviews. When asked what they felt were the relative strengths and
weaknesses of their portfolio, it would often be the students whose
observational drawings were the weakest who would describe drawing as an
area of strength. Meanwhile, those showing greatest progress would often be
the most conscious of their shortcomings. In his 1857 book The Elements of
Drawing: In Three Letters to Beginners (Smith, Elder & Co), the Victorian
artist and critic John Ruskin famously wrote:
I believe that (irrespective of differences in individual temper and
character) the excellence of an artist, as such, depends wholly on
refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly, which a master
or a school can teach...I am nearly convinced, that when once we
see keenly enough, there is very little difficulty in drawing what we
see; but, even supposing that this difficulty be still great, I believe
that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I
would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love
Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to
draw...
This can be seen as essentially an argument against passive drawing skills
and in favour of drawings as a way of opening up visual ‘knowing’ and the
pictorial imagination, a view also espoused by Howard Pyle, the late
nineteenth-century American realist painter, illustrator, influential teacher
and founder of the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art (later termed the
Brandywine School by illustrator and author Henry C. Pitz). In a stance never
comfortably embraced across the various levels of educational management,
Pyle further proposed that drawing and illustration stand comparison with
established areas of professional education:
Pictures are the creations of the imagination and not of technical
facility, and that…which art students most need is the cultivation
of their imagination and its direction into practical and useful
channels of creation – and I hold that this is exactly in line with
other kinds of professional education, whether of law, medicine,
finance or physics. I would not belittle the necessity of accurate
technical training. I insist upon that in my own school even more
strenuously than it is insisted upon in the great art schools of the
country; but I subordinate that technical training entirely to the
training of the imagination.
Traditionally, illustration was mainly taught by practising illustrators working part-time alongside their
primary activities. With illustration now often taught in the environment of higher education, this vital
practice has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Edward Ardizzone taught in London, at
Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art. This illustration is one of several
he produced for Camberwell’s jubilee publication in 1948.
Sketchbook drawings by Heera Cha, combining observation with a hint of caricature.

In 1979 another influential educator, Professor Bruce Archer, who

championed Design Research at the Royal College of Art in London,
contributed a paper to the first volume of the journal Design Studies in which
he argued that the well-known phrase ‘The Three Rs’, used in the English
language to describe what are seen as the three basic skills to learn in
school: reading, writing and arithmetic, was anomalous. He pointed out that
reading and writing were two sides, passive and active, of the same skill –
the language skill – and suggested that the third fundamental area of education
should relate to the ‘material culture’: a level of awareness that comes from
art, design, music, drama and dance. To illustrate his point, he claimed to
have an elderly great-aunt who swore that the concept of the‘Three R’s’
should be replaced by:
Reading and writing
Reckoning and figuring
Wroughting and wrighting
He went on to explain that by ‘wroughting and wrighting’, his (possibly
imaginary) great aunt meant ‘knowing how things are brought about’. Archer
speculated that ‘Design’ or ‘Design Awareness’ might best define this area of
tacit knowledge, and should form the third fundamental of a rounded
education.
The Royal College of Art in London, at which Archer taught, was key to
the development of education in the applied arts. Indeed, the arts education
system in the UK is still relatively unusual in offering Illustration as a
discrete subject. The influence of the British and American art education
systems is still felt in many parts of the world, but in much of Europe the
specific field of Illustration as an appropriate subject for undergraduate and
postgraduate-level university education has been slower to find acceptance.
Similarly, in many parts of East and South-East Asia, students wishing to
develop their illustration skills in a contextually informed and highly
personal way will often seek to study in the UK and US.

For much of its history, art education as a whole was built around drawing from the model in the life
room. This drawing, from Cambridge School of Art archive, is by an unknown student, 1960s.
 To return to Ruskin, the ability to see is key to the process of drawing
effectively from observation and imagination. It involves a tortuous process
of learning to bypass the brain’s attempts to fool us into thinking we know in
order to listen to what the eyes are telling us. Richard Carline, both a senior
examiner of art in schools and a painter himself, wrote in depth about this in
his book Draw They Must: A History of the Teaching and Examining of Art
(Edward Arnold, 1968). He lamented the way that art practice in schools
was seen as something to be studied only by those wishing to go on to art
college (this is even more the case today). He argued that it should be seen as
an important element of a broad education alongside the study of English and
Mathematics, echoing the philosophies of Ruskin and Pyle when writing
about what drawing is and what it is for:
The main goal of art teaching is not technical proficiency or skill,
as usually assumed, but the development of the visual perceptions.
Perhaps the art class might gain in status by a change in name,
with ‘art’ discarded in favour of ‘vision’.
Ruskin’s famous assertion that ‘Fine art is that in which the hand, the head,
and the heart of man go together’ was referring to an art world that was much
more deeply embedded in the formal skills of drawing than is the case now.
With illustration being perhaps one of the last bastions of draughtsmanship as
a primary tool of expression, it is more than a little at odds with the
university culture it often finds itself within. Because of its perceived
association with that slippery concept, ‘skill’ or craft, it has sometimes
struggled to find its place in academia, while the appreciation and academic
study of children’s picturebooks has tended, perhaps perversely, to fall
within the fields of literature and education studies. In these contexts, the
motivations, intentions and ‘meanings’ of artists’ works can be easily
misunderstood or replaced by academic projections. Asked on the BBC
radio programme Desert Island Discs in 2020 about the motivation behind
her pioneering depiction of multi-racial characters in her books, the
celebrated illustrator Helen Oxenbury replied that she simply draws the
world that she sees around her.
Throughout the twentieth century many leading commercial artists were commissioned to pass on their
knowledge in popular ‘how-to’ books. Shown here are leading poster designer Gregory Brown’s How
to Draw Trees (The Studio, 1943); Art School For Everyone – Everywhere, published by Albert
Dorne and Norman Rockwell’s Famous Artists School correspondence course in 1962; volume 6 of ¡ya
dibujo!, Andrés Sepúlveda’s drawing manuals; and Manuel Trillo’s Dibujo-Lenguage, first published in
1935.

Illustration is also an activity that has spawned an industry of self-

learning leisure-pursuit products; books, correspondence courses and more
recently video downloads. With the enduring perception of illustration as a
hybrid subject, straddling fine art and graphic design, the activity tended
throughout much of the twentieth century to emerge from one or other of these
two study routes, both of which were firmly based in the formal teaching of
drawing. In the UK and US, from the 1970s onwards, discrete, named
undergraduate and postgraduate courses in illustration began to appear. It
remains the case that aspiring illustrators are taught primarily by established
practitioners, and the need to guide and nurture their development based on
individual creative leanings and directions is still paramount. As the
illustrator and educator John Vernon Lord observes in Drawing Upon
Drawing (University of Brighton, 2007):
It is important to build up a relationship with students, one in
which there is mutual trust and understanding. Timing is of the
essence – recognizing promising directions in students’ work at
precisely the right moment...and encouraging them to develop
something along these lines and go all out for it.
While emphasizing that good illustration is about much more than drawing,
Lord goes on to suggest:
One of the best antidotes to overcoming problems in your work as
an illustrator, I think, is to draw from direct observation. Trying to
make visual sense of what you can see in front of you, and
 translating this by making an image on a flat surface, is always an
overwhelming challenge – well worth taking on if you are at a low
ebb with your work.
From a teaching perspective, the relationship between drawing, illustration,
generalizable knowledge and the needs of the individual artist have always
been a matter for debate and dispute, as illustrated by the following two mid-
twentieth century British illustrators Edward Ardizzone and Lynton Lamb.
 ‘It seems that (Ardizzone) keeps his nose to the
paper and draws out of his head. When he makes
his characters turn a leg or drop a curtsey, they
do it so well because he has always copied the very
best masters’

Edward Ardizzone and

Lynton Lamb: ‘Born’
or ‘true’?

There are two things that all born illustrators have in common. The
first is that their creative imagination is fired by the written word
rather than the thing seen; the second is that when it comes to their
illustrations, they would rather make them up than have recourse to
life. In fact, as a rule, they don’t like drawing from life at all.
So wrote one of the greatest illustrators of the twentieth
century, Edward Ardizzone, in 1957, having been persuaded to
write a rare, short essay expounding his views on the key qualities
that make a good illustrator. The following year, he gave an address
at a meeting of the Double Crown Club in Brighton, England, in
which he recycled his views under the title ‘The Born Illustrator’.
His speech was published in the first issue of the graphic arts
journal Motif in November of that year. Ardizzone’s views,
expressed in a somewhat dogmatic manner, caused considerable
controversy. They were, he said, partly informed by his role as a
visiting teacher of Illustration at the Royal College of Art. He was
dismissive of much illustration of the time and, most surprisingly, of
the importance of direct observational drawing in the development
of the illustrator, citing the illustrators George Cruikshank and
Honoré-Victorin Daumier as examples to back up his argument:
‘One denied that he ever drew from life and the other was never
seen to do so’.
Ardizzone’s point that the born illustrator prefers to create ‘his
own version of the world around him’ was, and of course still is, to
some extent true. But Ardizzone, while not having had a formal art
school education, had attended a rigorous programme of life
drawing and painting under the tuition of the figurative painter
Bernard Meninsky, which he mentions only in passing. He doesn’t
seem to differentiate between drawing from life as sight-skill-
building and drawing from life as illustration reference. He asserts
that most illustration students would do better if they learned by
copying from the work of the great masters and then by ‘drawing a
thing over and over again until it looks right’. This, he continues, is
how the born illustrator gradually compiles a sort of ‘dictionary of
forms’, helped by instructional books on such subjects as ‘how to
draw trees’. He only somewhat grudgingly advises that it can be
useful to occasionally return to direct observation from the nature
to ‘confirm’ or ‘sweeten’ knowledge.
This should, of course, be seen in the context of the time in
which it was written. Ardizzone was endeavouring to contrast the
painter’s need for embedded academic drawing skills with the
illustrator’s narrative imagination. Perhaps he was trying to make
clear that being a great draughtsman is not the primary qualification
for good illustration, but in doing so he appears to suggest that
observational drawing skills could be a hindrance to the illustrator’s
imagination. Such a view must also have been influenced by his own
particular, unusual genius in observing human, social behaviour with
an acute visual memory. In his biography of Ardizzone, his brother-
in-law Gabriel White recalls seeing the artist sitting on a park
bench, drawing in his sketchbook a scene from memory while
simultaneously observing and committing to memory a group of
nearby characters.
 Edward Ardizzone developed specific working methods that he claimed were not
primarily rooted in direct observational drawing, but in ‘finding a way to draw
things’. His strong sense of light and shade was executed through his distinctive
pen and ink cross-hatching technique. This was usually preceded by careful planning
in soft pencil, as shown in this illustration from Brief to Counsel by Henry Cecil
(Michael Joseph, 1958).
 Ardizzone revered the work of the great Victorian illustrator George Cruikshank.
He felt that Cruikshank’s illustration of Charles Dickens’s Fagin in his condemned
cell, shown here in final engraved form alongside a sheet of preparatory studies, was
one of the great examples of dramatic illustration.
 Lynton Lamb’s illustration work was informed by a formal art education as a painter.
He wrote and illustrated County Town, based on everyday life in his home town of
Chelmsford (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950).

The second issue of Motif was published in February 1959. In it,

Lynton Lamb, a very different kind of illustrator, took Ardizzone to task
under the title ‘The True Illustrator’, opening with more than a hint of
sarcasm:
In Motif No. 1, Edward Ardizzone explained how he works as an
illustrator. It seems that he keeps his nose to the paper and draws out of
his head. When he makes his characters turn a leg or drop a curtsey, they
do it so well because he has always copied the very best masters.
However, he likes to take a peek at life from time to time to see if it is
conforming to precept. If it is not, it is probably out of character.
Lamb explains that he does not work out of his head but from copious
notes and references. He was a painter as well as an illustrator, and his
work was rigidly rooted in observation. There is no hint of the
playfulness and warmth that characterized Ardizzone’s drawings, as he
explains:
I work standing at a high bench; and however small the scale of my
illustration may be or however closely knit to its typographic setting, I
always check the ‘colour values’ of its tonal pattern and its final balance
and tension, by looking at it from a painting distance on my easel.
Lamb, if rather dryly, argues that there are many valid approaches to
the relationship between drawing from nature and drawing for
illustration. He concedes that, in the words of the seventeenth-century
century dramatist Richard Flecknoe, ‘Truth hath no greater enemy than
verisimilitude or likelihood’. Ultimately, he concludes, ‘the important
thing is the transmutation of artifice or fact to a moment of dramatic
truth’.
For many working illustrators today, even the opportunity to, as
Ardizzone put it, occasionally ‘sweeten’ from life can be elusive. But the
building blocks will nevertheless be in place to provide a lifelong
underpinning.
A rare surviving wartime copy of Parade magazine, featuring an early Edward
Ardizzone cover design with fully hand-drawn imagery and lettering.
 CHAPTER 2

The Basics
 Learning to see
‘Once one has drawn from observation a bicycle, its
workings and construction are forever ingrained in
memory. We know a bicycle in a completely different
way’

The ‘mechanics’ of drawing can be variously broken down into constituent

parts. For the beginner, it would be extremely difficult (and probably
counterproductive) to try to consciously juggle all of these elements while
drawing; line, tone, composition and so on are often employed
unconsciously, and eventually form an integrated whole. They are learned
primarily through drawing and through looking at drawings.
It is a common misconception that an ability to draw is an innate ‘gift’
that individuals either are or are not in possession of. It is also often assumed
that drawing is primarily a hand skill. While, as with many other activities,
some people will develop a particular affinity with or ability to express
themselves through drawing, the basics of learning to draw what you see can
be learned by most. First, it is necessary to understand what ‘seeing’ actually
means. A useful way of demonstrating this is through what has long been a
standard project in the first weeks of study on an undergraduate illustration
course, and which can be undertaken by anyone in their own time. Take a list
of ten things that you are bound to have ‘seen’ within the previous twenty-
four hours. Some of these will depend on the locale in which the project
takes place, but they might include, for example, a bicycle, the main entrance
to the institution, a bank note or coin, a prominent monument in the city
centre. Then, make a drawing from memory of each of these on a single large
sheet of paper, with plenty of space between each. Once this is completed, go
out and draw each of the items directly from observation alongside your
memory drawings.
The results are always revelatory – invariably demonstrating how little
of our visible world we genuinely see. Once one has drawn from observation
a bicycle, its workings and construction are forever ingrained in memory. We
know a bicycle in a completely different way. This project provides an
important lesson in how to begin to distrust those insistent messages from the
brain, trying to tell us that we know, as it does battle with our eyes, which
are trying to lead us to a different kind of knowing – visual knowing. No
tricks or clever techniques can replace this kind of knowledge.
In these characteristically lightning-quick drawings from direct observation by Feliks Topolski, it is clear
from the searching nature of his lines that his eyes were firmly on the characters that he was observing,
seeking out the key characteristics of posture that he would have had only a few seconds to commit to
paper (The London Spectacle, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1935).
I made this ink drawing of fellow student Angela Barrett when I was at art college. It was drawn
‘semi-blind’, eyes and pen following the shapes of the figure and only periodically looking down at the
emerging drawing.
John Minton often mixed direct observational drawings with others worked up in the studio. This
drawing of a gold-beater at work was clearly made on location, betrayed by the reworking of lines
(Leaves of Gold, George M. Wiley, 1951).

‘Blind drawing’ is a useful way of continuing to build knowledge of the

visual world. The term refers to drawing while keeping the eyes permanently
focused on the subject of the drawing and not allowing oneself to look at the
drawing itself as it evolves. This of course means that the drawing may not
‘join up’ at all and involves a complete lack of control over any perceived
ideas of ‘finish’. But it enforces total dependence on the eyes at the expense
of any retreat into a preconceived ‘safe zone’ of generalized rendering. It is,
of course, a means to an end, the end being the gradual building of visual
understanding.
 In any event, when drawing from observation, it is advisable to aim to
spend something like seventy per cent of the time with eyes focused on the
subject and a maximum of thirty per cent with eyes focused on the paper. This
is the reverse ratio of what tends to happen instinctively, so it requires
considerable discipline and focus (I have often joked with students that I
intend to patent a drawing aid in the form of a neck brace that locks the head
into a position that only allows its wearer to look forwards, but has a timed
release mechanism to allow periodic short glances at the sketchbook). The
more you do this the more natural it becomes. In time, this kind of looking
becomes habitual, increasingly leading to a habit of ‘mentally drawing’ when
not actually physically drawing. You will find yourself looking at, for
example, a figure on a park bench and registering the line of the shoulders
through the head or the tension in the folds of a coat created by the bend of an
elbow.

A drawing of a group of farmers at a cattle market by an unknown 1970s art student, showing the
constant scrutiny and reassessment of lines as the characters move.
 Tools and materials
‘Discovering whether one is ultimately most
comfortable drawing expansively with a twig dipped in
ink or intimately with a 7H pencil takes time and artistic
self-knowledge’

The wide range of materials and drawing tools that are available to artists
today can be highly seductive. There is always a temptation to believe that
this or that tool will lead to a better drawing. While experimenting with a
range of media is ultimately important, when trying to get to grips with the
basics of drawing, it is advisable to focus on the process of learning to see
rather than giving in to the distractions of the respective effects that can be
created by the myriad drawing implements available. A humble 3B or 4B
pencil is difficult to better in terms of the range of linear and tonal marks that
it can deliver, especially when drawing on location with the need to get
visual information down on paper at speed. Once confidence in drawing
begins to grow, many will branch out to explore and experiment before
ultimately finding the tools and media that best suit their own artistic
temperament. Discovering whether one is ultimately most comfortable
drawing expansively with a twig dipped in ink or intimately with a 7H pencil
takes time and artistic self-knowledge. Of course, the tools that you use will
have a bearing on the scale at which you work, and it is surprising how often
this can be overlooked. Trying to draw at a large scale with a hard pencil or
delicate nib can be as dispiriting as using a lump of charcoal in a tiny
sketchbook.
When it comes to making illustration, the wide choice of media,
traditional and digital, becomes much more relevant and is touched on further
through the work of many artists throughout this book.
One of greatest illustrators of his time, Ronald Searle always remained almost reverential in his respect
for his tools. As well as numerous trial sheets, he kept a framed collection of nibs (bottom left), each
labelled and written with the nib being described.
 Line
‘The line as a tool for describing and commenting
visually is still fundamental to drawing for illustration’

In Chapter 1, we touched on the huge leap of faith that is involved in

accepting the convention of an outline as a representation of form, an ability
that, as far as we know, only humans possess. And even for us, it has to be
learned. But the drawn line, more than the outlines of shapes, can express
rhythm, movement, light, space and much more, as the artist grows an
understanding of its handling and potential.
The typographer and book designer Douglas Martin perfectly expressed
the concept of the illustrator’s use of line as a ‘voice’ in titling his 1989
collection of essays on leading book illustrators The Telling Line. It is a
phrase that still resonates, even though it could be argued that today’s
illustrators may be slightly less dependent on line than those whose careers
were forged mainly at a time when black and white letterpress line-block
printing predominated. The line as a tool for describing and commenting
visually is still fundamental to drawing for illustration, with its ability, in the
right hands, to express so much more than the boundaries of shapes.
Egon Schiele’s mastery of the expressive potential of the drawn line is perfectly captured in this 1914
drawing of Friederike Maria Beer, Woman with Arms Raised.
Until the 1960s, a great deal of black and white line illustration was still printed using the letterpress line
block. Process White opaque gouache was used to paint over ‘mistakes’, as can be seen in this original
artwork by Susan Einzig from The Children’s Song Book (text by Elizabeth Poston, The Bodley Head,
1961).
 Tone
‘Plot the areas of light against dark until the shape of
the subject begins to emerge from the gloom’

As we have seen, illustrators have traditionally tended to think in terms of

line to describe where shapes begin and end and to tell stories. But some
subject matter demands tonal treatment, typically where strong lighting and
atmosphere are key to the subject’s representation. Working tonally from
observation means thinking in a completely different way. Learning to see
and describe form and volume through the fall of light on three-dimensional
shapes can be facilitated by abandoning the idea of making dark marks on a
light surface.
An excellent way to start is by covering a sheet of paper with soft
graphite or charcoal and rubbing in to make a mid-tone. Then, instead of
drawing with a pencil or charcoal, ‘draw’ with an eraser. Plot the areas of
light against dark until the shape of the subject begins to emerge from the
gloom. Once again, this means spending much more time looking at the
subject than at the drawing. When engaged in a tonal drawing such as this, I
invariably find myself screwing up my eyes until they are almost closed, in
order to clear away all of the distracting detail so that I can measure the
relative tones of one surface against another. It helps to disentangle ‘local’
colour (i.e. the actual colour of surfaces – a dark blue wall or a brown desk)
from the relative strength of tones. A white-painted wall in deep shadow can
be darker than a blue wall in strong sunlight. Time to drown out the noise of
the brain and ‘listen’ to the eyes again.
In this drawing by Pam Smy, made as an undergraduate illustration student, her primary concern was to
establish the relative tonal values in a challenging scene where the tonal range was extremely narrow.
Only the few areas of pure light are left unshaded, brought back with the use of an eraser to reveal the
white of the paper.
A good way to develop an understanding of tone is to draw at night. In this sketchbook image of a
railway station exterior, Seoungjun Baek cleverly simplifies a complex scene, picking out the light
sources and the fall of diluted light on surfaces using charcoal, eraser and white ink pen.
Making fully tonal drawings in the life-drawing studio to describe space, this unnamed student at the
Cambridge School of Art rubbed down a layer of charcoal into the paper and ‘drew’ the fall of light
with the eraser, gradually re-establishing darker darks and adding minimal line here and there to clarify
some boundaries. The shapes around the figure are as important to its description as the figure itself.
 Using line to describe tone
‘Artists…developed various ingenious ways of mark-
making in solid “line” in order to create the illusion of
continuous tone’

For much of its history, the appearance of illustration has been closely linked
to the requirements and limitations of commercial printing processes. In the
past, reproduction of continuous tonal gradation from artwork, created using
media such as pencil or washes, was much more expensive than that which
had been executed in solid blacks. Printers’ use of half-tone screens to
photographically convert continuous tonal washes into tiny black dots of
varying size and density could lead to rather insipid results. The word ‘line’
was applied, perhaps a little misleadingly, to the production of original
artwork using only solid blacks (i.e. no washes or pencil work containing
tonal gradation). Artists therefore developed various ingenious ways of
mark-making in solid black ‘line’ in order to create the illusion of continuous
tone. These included cross-hatching, stippling and the use of ‘mechanical
tints’ – commercially produced, pre-printed sheets of dots and lines that
could be cut out and stuck down onto the artwork. The differences in printing
costs are now minimal, but the descriptive and decorative effects that these
originally purely functional processes and approaches give remain popular.
Eric Hobbs collaged a range of mechanical tints to create this ‘line’ printed illustration, used to explain
the workings of an advertising agency in Drawing for Advertising (The Studio, 1956).

In this drawing made on the Croatian island of Šipan, I was concerned to show the contrast between the
dark tones and textures of the scrub-covered hillside across the bay, and the light falling on the sea. This
meant building up a sense of continuous tone with a lot of line-work.
 Mark-making and printmaking
‘Gestural mark-making can be a way of expressing a
more emotional or tactile response to your subject’

In its broadest sense, the term ‘mark-making’ refers to the many and varied
forms of mark that can be produced with different implements on a variety of
surfaces. It tends to be more specifically associated with the kind of drawing
that employs dynamic and perhaps experimental or intuitive approaches to
drawing through expressive exploration of lines, shapes and textures. As
well as the direct making of marks on a surface, this can include scratching
into layers of ink or pastel to create marks and shapes by revealing the
surface below. Gestural mark-making can be a way of expressing a more
emotional or tactile response to your subject, whether from direct
observation or from memory or imagination. It inevitably means giving in to
a degree of loss of control and embracing accident.
Mark-making in drawing naturally overlaps with and includes the use of
‘print’. By ‘print’, I mean the application of inks or other liquid media to an
object or surface before pressing it onto paper or another surface to leave a
(reverse) transferred impression. This is where the boundaries between
drawing and printmaking become blurred. Printmaking itself can often be an
activity rooted in drawing for limited editions of reproduction, while
drawing directly onto paper may incorporate elements of print.
In Chapter 1 I observed how, in Lynton Lamb’s 1962 Drawing for
Illustration, a great deal of attention was inevitably given to the need for
illustrators to use methods, tools and materials that would best allow their
work to reproduce well through the print processes of the day, including the
preparation of colour separations for letterpress printing. Although there is
still a need to give some thought to what kind of approaches will reproduce
best on paper or screen, advances in technology have made such issues
somewhat less critical. Paradoxically, however, interest in traditional
printmaking processes for the ‘raw’ or organic aesthetic that they can
facilitate has grown. Often these processes are combined with digital ones as
a means of assemblage. Some printmaking processes, such as etching and
lithography, can involve drawing directly onto the plate or stone. Others,
such as screenprinting and linocut, tend to involve the need to think in terms
of shape rather than line.

In this location drawing by Anna Ring, a range of marks are employed, using inks and coloured pencils
to contrast loose fine lines with vigorously applied areas of tone and pattern.
Nastya Smirnova’s Self-portrait, Cambodia uses stippling and repeat printing of shapes to create a
vibrant example of mark-making.

In this image, Hye-Young Kim’s highly personal and expressive approach to drawing features delicate,
sensitive mark-making with broadly applied washes of colour.
Combining painted textures and collage with monoprint drawing, Hanieh Ghashghaei successfully
integrates a range of marks into a unified whole.
 ‘Once back in the studio I will transfer my sketch
onto layout paper and draw and redraw the
design until it feels correct’

Christopher Brown:
Drawing for linocut

Christopher Brown’s highly respected work as an illustrator and

teacher spans the decades since he completed his studies at
London’s Royal College of Art in the 1970s. Through the college, he
was introduced to Edward Bawden, one of the most important
figures in the history of the linocut and the whole of the graphic
arts. On graduating, Brown’s work soon became a familiar sight in
the stylish magazines and design publications of the time. Over the
years he has become increasingly associated with linocut, and works
both to commission and for himself. In 2012 he created his
illustrated An Alphabet of London, each spread of which presents
visually a place or aspect of his home city in a playfully cryptic
manner, with little implied narratives interwoven into the pages.
Born and raised in Putney, he wanted to reflect his love of the city
and its many faces. Here, he muses on the sometimes complex and
more specific relationship between drawing and design for him, and
in the context of his chosen medium.
I’ve never really considered myself a draughtsman. While at the
RCA I was in awe of those who could effortlessly record what was
in front of them. During the first and second years (of what was
then a three-year course) my illustrations were based on life filtered
through my imagination; it was only when I went to stay at the
college’s Paris studio that I really started to draw what was around
me. It was my tutor Sheila Robinson who sent me off to meet
Edward Bawden, and it was on our subsequent sketching holidays to
Cornwall that I learned how to draw – from observing Edward and
persevering. I tried to put into practice what I learned on those
holidays with EB when it came to the Alphabet.
In my bag I always try to have a sketchbook, a small Moleskine
notebook (I prefer the paper to that of the sketchbook) and a
Fineliner pen (0.3). When it comes to drawing for a project I use
three methods – drawing from memory or what I imagine, drawing
from reference from found images and, finally, drawing from
observation. An Alphabet of London incorporated all three methods,
but it was the third that was the most important – I had to visit all of
the locations from A to Z – from ‘Queen Anne’s Alcove’ to the
‘Zoo’. The drawing was vital for me to design the cut – it had to
work for the square format I had (perhaps unwisely) chosen. The
sketches are to help me design the final image. They are an aide
mémoire – and really for my eyes only – I would feel rather ashamed
to show them to a topographical artist! These sketches are
important for me to get a sense of place – the time of day, the people
walking and, of course, any dogs.
Edward always advised me when sketching to try and be in a
position where people don’t look over your shoulder – most off-
putting! My sketches are quick, so perhaps the unwelcome viewer
doesn’t have time to catch me.
I also learned from Edward to try different points of view – what
makes the best ‘design’. It’s not about verisimilitude, it’s about
trying to make an interesting composition that can then be refined
when back at the studio. A lamp post or pillar box may be moved or
even added. And certainly populating an image with characters that
might well have been seen but equally might be imagined. In ‘W is
for Westminster’, the nun and the chap on the mobile were observed
and the monsignor was added partly because I wanted a figure to
balance the composition, but also because I wanted a splash of red
in the picture. In ‘Y is for York Hall’ I thought it would be amusing
to have a towelled, plump, pink figure, as if he had come from the
Turkish baths.
 The drawings that Christopher Brown makes for his linocuts primarily take the form
of compositional plans that are ultimately executed in the form of flat shapes. The
initial outline drawings are transferred onto the lino blocks using tracing paper. The
blocks are then ready for cutting.

Colour is also important. I note the colour on location and will take a
photo as a reminder, but the colour is added to reinforce the design – if I
was to be true to colours on the days on which I sketched the place the
pages would have had a very similar palette. Skies can be yellow, pink or
purple if I so wish.
 Once back in the studio I will transfer my sketch onto layout paper
and draw and redraw the design until it feels correct. The areas of
colour are blocked in using Pantones, so that when it comes to mixing
colours I can hopefully replicate. The Alphabet was produced in a
relatively short period of time, about six months, and much as I would
have liked to produce twenty-six full-colour prints I just didn’t have the
time, so I printed up blocks of textures that could be scanned and laid
down using Photoshop.
The obvious difference between my sketch and the final cut is the
weight of line. My drawings are rather fine and scribbly, the cuts far
bolder and more graphic. Although, as I said, drawing is not what I
consider my strength, it is vital to my working process. When I was with
Edward Bawden in Cornwall the drawing was a more relaxed process,
Edward working on two paintings a day, I labouring away with my
pencils – I really should have picked up brush and watercolour like
Edward! I still have some of his initial sketches drawn in 2B that he
discarded. It’s interesting to see how loose those first marks of his are,
quickly working out a composition before applying colour.
 Composition and structure
‘As you gain confidence in drawing, identifying and
incorporating an overall sense of structure becomes
more possible’

‘Composition’ is really another word for ‘arrangement’. Whether applied to

the positioning of a single object within a given space or the arrangement of a
complex assembly of elements into a harmonious whole, it is a fundamental
aspect of drawing. When we encounter a visual image for the first time, a
considerable proportion of our response to that image is registered in the
first millisecond of seeing it. We respond to its basic structure and dynamics,
the ‘building blocks’, well before we have registered any of the pictorial
narrative detail contained within it. It is therefore essential to develop a
strong sense of composition in planning an image through drawing. It can be
very easy when preoccupied with rendering detail to lose track of the
underlying arrangement of shapes and the dialogue between them. This
becomes particularly important in the context of drawing for picturebook
illustration, where the artist not only has to consider shapes in relation to a
single frame or page, but also in relation to the central vertical gutter of a
double-page spread. On top of this, the positioning of the lines of text must be
considered from the outset as part of the overall design concept of the page.
One of the things that I find myself saying more often than any other when
working with children’s book- illustration students on picturebook-making is
‘if your image is perfectly composed before you have added the text, it’s a
bad composition’.
When drawing scenes of daily life directly from observation, especially
when the subject involves people on the move, retaining a sense of
composition can be particularly challenging. Getting the basic ‘architecture’
of the space satisfactorily positioned at the outset allows for flexibility of
content within the overall structure, letting moving elements enter and leave
the field of vision. It is advisable not to be too preoccupied by composition
when learning to draw from observation; trying to juggle too many things at
this stage can be counterproductive and dispiriting. But as you gain
confidence in drawing, identifying and incorporating an overall sense of
structure becomes more possible. To this end, knowing what to leave out
becomes at least as important as knowing what to include when drawing.
As an artist, you are not a camera. Drawing a scene from observation
involves a great deal of decision-making about what to include, where to
position yourself, how to frame the image, what overall shape of image best
suits the subject. So often one will see a student begin a drawing in the centre
of a sketchbook page and end it when the drawing ‘falls off the edge’ of it.
The shape of the sketchbook page may not be the best shape for your subject,
so it is important to not allow it to dictate to you. Either choose a
composition that works best within the shape of the page or spread, or make
a frame within it that is best for your concept.
Paul Hogarth was a master of dynamic composition in his reportage drawings. In this 1963 drawing of
the Pratt, Read & Co. Road piano-key factory in the Connecticut River Valley, he renders the intricate
brickwork to create a dynamic dialogue between line and textured tone. Reproduced in Paul Hogarth’s
American Album (Lion & Unicorn Press, 1973).
A ceramicist as well as illustrator, Aude Van Ryn uses colour as a compositional tool to divide space and
draw the eye to the figure in this drawing, which was made on location at London’s Kew Gardens.

As with many areas of the arts, throughout history there have been many
mathematical formulae applied to compositional structures in art, perhaps
most notably the identification of the ‘Golden Section’ or ‘Mean’ by the
fifteenth-century Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli. Put simply, his
proposition was that when, in linear terms, the short piece is to the long
piece as the long piece is to the whole, an aesthetically satisfying, perfectly
balanced composition is achieved. Although it can be helpful to play around
with this formula on paper to gain a full understanding of its meaning and
application, it is debatable how much conscious use can be derived from it
when actually drawing. As the illustrator, curator, painter and writer Barbara
Jones put it so eloquently in her typically no-nonsense instructional book,
Water-colour Painting: A Practical Guide (Adam and Charles Black,
1960): ‘Alas, it is a fact that although almost every good painting can be
turned into mathematics, it is almost impossible to start with the
mathematics and get a good painting.’
Barbara Jones used a no-nonsense approach to explain issues of composition in her 1960 book Water-
colour Painting. These very rough, quick sketches describe perfectly, with wry humour, some of the
‘dos and don’ts’.
 Perspective
‘It is not necessary to study all of the complex rules of
perspective in order to grasp the basics’

Formal rules of perspective are rarely taught these days outside the context of
architectural or technical drawing. But, as with all rules, a broad
understanding of the principles is useful, whether the artist ultimately
chooses to adhere to or consciously flout them. There are various strands to
the history of the use of formal linear perspective in art, and some debate
about its origins. Filippo Brunelleschi is generally credited with being the
‘reinventor’ of the system of converging parallel lines to describe the
illusion of receding space on a flat surface. Wall paintings from as far back
as the first century BC, found near Pompeii, contain some examples of single-
point perspective, but not in a manner that suggests a fully evolved
mathematical approach. In East Asia, a much softer approach was generally
used to convey distance, using layers of gently receding banks of tone in both
painting and printmaking.
It is not necessary to study all of the complex rules of perspective in
order to grasp the basics. Much can be acquired through the process of
drawing from observation: a simple awareness of eye-level and the use of a
pencil held up horizontally against, for example, a distant rooftop to establish
its angle. There have been many instructional books on the subject of
perspective published over the years. One of the cleverest is Gwen White’s
1954 A Book of Pictorial Perspective (John Murray, 1954), with
illustrations drawn directly on the lithographic plate by the author. It
ingeniously allows the reader to see technical perspective diagrams overlaid
onto each of the three-colour illustrations. This was achieved by printing
linear diagrams of the colour scenes on the reverse side of the paper, each
one ‘flipped’ or reversed so that it lines up exactly with the colour image
when held up to the light.
One of the most useful and commonly encouraged exercises to understand
the principles of perspective is to look through a window on to a scene
outside, ideally including straight-edged structures, such as buildings. Try to
imagine that the scene is not a scene at all but a painting on the glass, the
window frame being the frame of a two-dimensional painting or drawing.
Close one eye and imagine that you are drawing or ‘tracing’ the lines of the
buildings directly onto the glass with a very long pencil. The frame of the
window forms a picture frame and helps clarify the angles of the shapes.
Gwen White’s ingenious method of teaching perspective involved holding the pages of a book up to the
light in order to reveal the instructional lines laid over the colour image. Here, we have flipped the colour
image in order to see them together.
I made this drawing over a period of two to three hours in the garden of an old house on the Croatian
island of Šipan. The portico-style structure gave a natural drama of receding perspective. My eye-level
was about a third of the way up the composition.
 Drawing and colour
‘The human eye can distinguish between somewhere in
the region of a million colours’

We tend to think of drawing in terms of black and white and painting in terms
of colour. But there are various intermediary forms where colour is used in
drawing. At what point a coloured drawing becomes a painting is something
of a moot point, but a painting is usually conceived at the outset as such, even
though drawing will sometimes play a role in its planning and development.
Using colour in observational drawing can take many forms. Inevitably, this
involves a great deal more ‘juggling’ and constant decision-making with
regards to how far to go, what to include and what to leave out in order to
retain some control of the overall design. Using a predetermined limited
palette can be a useful ‘way in’ to working with colour, beginning with just
two complementary colours, one warm and one cool. As with any other
aspect of learning to draw, learning to see and think in terms of colour is
crucial. Many illustration students (including myself many years ago) struggle
with colour. Others are fortunate enough to have a seemingly effortless and
intuitive flair for its use. It’s a complex subject, but always remember that it
is generally understood that the human eye can distinguish between
somewhere in the region of a million colours, so the twelve or so that you
have in your bag or pencil case are not going to magically be the ones that
you need. They are a starting point for a great deal of careful mixing in order
to achieve exactly what you want.
A very quick line and wash sketch made at my allotment. White inks were used last of all, to pick out
light against dark and add texture to the drawing.
This spectacular coloured pen and wash drawing by Olga Shevchenko does not attempt to describe
space and depth, but revels in contrasts of scale and the delicate dialogue between lines, shapes and
surface texture.
 ‘I’m conscious that the white space of the paper
plays a big role in the composition and harmony of
the piece’

Vyara Boyadjieva:
Line, form, colour

Vyara Boyadjieva is an artist and picturebook-maker from Bulgaria.

Her work is rooted in observational skills that underpin a highly
imaginative, subjective illustrative language. She often creates her
illustrations in paint, working in a fully tonal idiom, representing
space and depth through receding tones and colours. Here, she
reflects on some of these aspects in her work.
I merge forms and lines by intuition, I think. What I mean by
intuition is that these decisions don’t always have a rational
explanation, but rather are guided by the impression of the place,
the momentary experience and inevitably one’s personal state.
While sketching, I always strive to create visual harmony, so I
constantly check and if I can’t find it, I correct it by balancing with
lines, forms and colour. Concretely, I try to refine areas of the
sketch that are either too full or too empty, bearing in mind the
form/line relation.
What I always ask myself when painting is ‘are these colours
fighting for attention, or are they serving each other for the sake of
the whole?’ You can have chromatic harmony only when some of
them, with their presence, are making others look more beautiful.
This is something that I apply to the line and form dynamic, too.
There are cases where form is too ponderous and steals the stage
without necessarily conveying anything, and other cases where the
line is too quiet and lacks vibrancy, and we can barely hear what it
wants to tell us! So I’d say that I can’t follow a recipe, but I make
sure to always have my ‘harmony’ radar on. The colour palette
evolves as I work! I already have a limited choice of coloured
pencils, and I know that once I’ve started with some, I won’t be
using others, as they don’t match together. But this selection always
happens consequently and naturally.
I’m conscious that the white space of the paper plays a big role
in the composition and harmony of the piece and it’s a very useful
tool to narrate as well. I think I use it more wisely when I sketch
with just lines (ink pen), as I feel I’m only equipped with the lines
and the white to tell something. I really enjoy playing with this big
entity that is the white paper in a duet with the thin black line of the
ink pen. Strangely, I’m not that sensitive about it when I’m using
colour. Maybe because I rely too much on the narration that other
colours bring, and the white colour of the paper comes more as an
extra than a protagonist. It can be used as a negative space, but I
rarely do it, and I must confess that I often undervalue its potential
in my colour sketch work.
Usually when I paint, I think of all the elements in terms of
forms, instead of lines. But when I sketch, the circumstances and
the objective are very different. In order to get as much information
as you would like, you need to be fast, as life in front of you is
moving and changing continually. I try to adapt my thinking to the
circumstances on the street, which are uncontrollable and untamed
and inspire me to lose control when transferring them onto paper.
This is where the line drawing comes in handy, because it describes
and tells without slowing you down; it’s more spontaneous in a way.
I love colour, but even if I use it with line only, it still demands
decisions in terms of colour combinations, when a ‘simple’ black
line doesn’t. And thus the black line gives you a chance to be fully
immersed in the observation. So I’d say colour sketches are to me
sometimes irrelevant if colour is not needed to narrate or portray a
feeling. I think it makes you clumsy and slow in a fast-moving
situation that you could only catch with quick moves of the ink pen
that follow the slightest motions of your hand. The results often
look more vulnerable and shakier, because I’ve spent more time
staring at the object than looking at the paper.

Vyara Boyadjieva’s colour-pencil drawings are rooted in direct observation, but do

not aim for pure realism. The drawings combine direct observation with intuitive
pattern-making and design.
 People and environments
‘Developing a healthy combination of detached analysis
of shape and subjective interest in movement and
interaction is key’

Very few illustrators’ bodies of work have developed successfully without

an interest in drawing people. Of course, there are many successful graphic
artists whose work is driven more by an interest in, for example, surface
pattern and design, but bearing in mind that the vast majority of subject matter
for illustration emerges from the human experience, relationships and
storytelling of one sort or another, even in the field of non-fiction, the
representation of the human figure would seem to be of paramount
importance. Formal study in the life room of the naked figure has been central
to the education of generations of art students. Understanding the human form
through such analytical drawing has been seen as the foundation for all forms
of visual art throughout most of the history of art education. It is probably fair
to say that fewer and fewer establishments still exist where such teaching
still takes place.
The views expressed respectively by Edward Ardizzone and Lynton
Lamb give us insights into the complex issues around ‘academic’ drawing
and ‘anecdotal’ drawing. By ‘anecdotal’ drawing, I mean drawing that is
motivated primarily by subjective interest in human behaviour and
interaction, as distinct from a primarily academic interest in form and
structure. Certainly such intense interest is clear to see in all of Edward
Ardizzone’s illustrative work, while another of the great twentieth-century
illustrators, Ronald Searle, when asked what he would have been had he not
been an illustrator, is said to have replied ‘a voyeur’.
Drawing people is of course more difficult than drawing static subjects.
Not just because they are always on the move, but also due to the fact that we
spend so much time looking at them, in everyday life and also on screens, that
our minds are filled with preconceptions about what they look like. So
developing a healthy combination of detached analysis of shape and
subjective interest in movement and interaction is key. Another factor that can
inhibit students when drawing people is the fear of their subjects becoming
aware that they are being drawn. So it is important to develop strategies to
enable the artist to feel comfortable and able to fully focus on the job at hand.
When drawing in places where people congregate, such as markets and
shopping malls, I often recommend seeking out viewpoints from above.
People rarely look up, so it is possible to study their natural movements and
gestures with intense focus, including the challenge of new angles and
foreshortenings. Observing the body language of people interacting with each
other is especially important in underpinning character-based narrative
illustration.
Perhaps the most challenging task of all is that of drawing children. The
fact that they are constantly on the move means that it is likely that only the
slightest of sketches can be achieved. Speed of eye and thought becomes
essential when processing shapes and movements in just a few seconds. This
means that it is particularly important to concentrate primarily on overall
body shape before attempting too much in the way of facial detail or clothing.
Young children are able to sit, move and contort their bodies in ways that are
impossible for adults, so once again the process of casting off
preconceptions and trusting only the eyes is paramount in order to capture the
briefest of moments.
Charlotte Bownass was fortunate enough to have access to this RADA scenic art workshop in 2012.
She made the most of the opportunity to explore people in relation to their very specific environment,
using the full height and width of the open sketchbook to express the relative scale of figures and
interior space.
A page from one of Sheila Robinson’s sketchbooks from the late 1940s/early 1950s, showing Cromer in
Norfolk. Beaches in the summertime are ideal locations for people-watching.
Taking children to swimming classes provides a wonderful opportunity to make very quick studies of
children and the ways in which they relate to the spaces that they are in, as in these pages from the
sketchbook of Jo Spooner.
At this second-hand book fair, I first tried to get a very rough indication of the space ‘jotted’ in, and then
drew the figures as and when they paused to look at books. A drawing such as this, made over about an
hour and a half, is, in contrast to a photograph, a synthesis of some of what slowly came and went in
front of me over that period of time.
Drawing people from above can very useful in helping to unravel preconceptions about body shape;
also, the subjects are less likely to be aware that they are being drawn. I drew these in a shopping mall.
Beatrice Alemagna originally trained in graphic design and typography, and did not receive formal
drawing instruction. She has only taken to drawing from direct observation more recently, as in these
drawings of her daughter. They demonstrate a fascinating fusion of an already mature illustrative
‘voice’ with a searching observational eye.
Children move so quickly that it is rare to have the opportunity to make sustained drawings, so speed of
eye is paramount. Angela Brooksbank’s drawings are full of sensitively observed detail of the shapes
and unselfconscious movements that only children can make.
 Drawing animals
‘The shapes being drawn are utterly alien’

One of the best ways to train the eye is to take a drawing trip to a zoo or
farm. I have noticed over the years how often illustration students produce
some of their best observational drawings when drawing animals and birds
directly from life. I have concluded that this must be due to the fact that, most
people do not look at live animals every day of their lives, and so the mind
surrenders more easily to the fact that the shapes being drawn are utterly
alien and more freely allows the eye to take over. An additional factor may
be the diminished levels of anxiety about whether or not the subject is aware
that it is being drawn!
Becky Brown’s drawings of animals and birds from direct observation are not only sharply observed,
but exhibit a playful graphic flair for making the most of their dramatic shapes.
This sheet of drawings of chickens was made by Paul Hogarth while teaching at Cambridge School of
Art. Chickens are something of a gift as a subject for drawing from life, their dramatic shapes being
easier to observe as they repeat the same movements over and over again.
Becky Brown’s lightning-quick sketches of baby owls and raccoons capture movement and posture as
well as an indication of the textures of plumage and fur.
 Drawing and photography
‘The camera lens functions in a very different way to
the lens of the human eye’

‘From today, painting is dead.’ So, supposedly, said the French painter Paul
Delaroche on first setting eyes upon an early daguerreotype photographic
print, sometime around 1840. Of course, painting was not about to die; like
most advancements in technology and the arts, photography precipitated a
different understanding of what art is, who art is for, and, in this instance,
what drawing and painting are ‘for’. The relationship between drawing and
photography is a complex one. But one thing is absolutely clear: it is not
possible to learn to draw, in any meaningful sense, through copying
photographs. As we have seen, learning to draw by learning to see is a
process of developing a visual understanding of form and space, developing
skills in processing and translating the complex three-dimensional world into
a two-dimensional representation or interpretation. The photograph does
most of this for us. A drawing from a photograph involves little more than a
process of rendering a surface. And to the trained eye (e.g. someone
experienced in drawing from observation) a drawing made from a
photographic reference is immediately identifiable as such. We have come to
think of the photographic image as synonymous with realistic representation.
But the camera lens functions in a very different way to the lens of the human
eye. While the human eye will adjust when moving from areas of light to dark
shadow, for instance, a camera lens may heighten contrast and leave a
blanket of shadow over areas of detail. The wide range of tones that the eye
sees in nature is limited in photographic imagery. The shadows that we see in
a photograph are not those that we see in the real world.
Of course, photography has been and continues to be an important aid to
illustrators in many ways. But for the serious student of drawing,
photographic references should be avoided until experience of drawing from
life has instilled knowledge and understanding, a healthy mistrust of
photographic sources and greater control over how they can be used to
supplement and inform.
Bernie Fuchs, famed for his advertising and magazine work in the 1950s and 1960s, was known to work
regularly from photographic reference material. He was able to do this successfully because he always
‘took ownership’ of imagery and imposed his own graphic ideas upon his sources. Where possible, he
took his own photographs. The pencil illustration of David Frost and Richard Nixon shown here shows
how he exploited graphically the simplified shadows produced by the camera lens. Below it is artwork
for a magazine illustration, with the rough layout indicated.
 CHAPTER 3

From Observation to Imagination

The renowned illustrator–teachers Edward Ardizzone and Lynton Lamb

debated the importance or relevance to illustrators of drawing directly
from life (see Chapter 1, pp. 38–43). In my own experience, the biggest
challenge for most illustration students is that of making natural links
between pure observation and imagination. After an intensive period of
location drawing, such as a field trip designed specifically for the
purpose, or a module or ‘unit’ in observational drawing, an immediate
follow-up project to explore imaginative and narrative responses often
causes problems such as excessive dependence on location drawings as
reference, or, by contrast, a tendency to immediately dive into over-
stylized illustration idioms that apparently owe little or nothing to
personal response and the experience of ‘being there’.
 The underlying reasons for these issues can be found in the nature of
our engagement with the subject when drawing on location. If I may try
to illustrate this through the use of extremes: at one end of the spectrum,
it is possible be a highly skilled analytical draughtsman but to draw in
an essentially passive way, delivering a thoroughly competent
representation of a chosen view of a three-dimensional subject, but with
little or no sense of a personal visual response. At the other end of the
spectrum, we may find an approach to observational drawing that is so
subjective and emotional that little in the way of actual representational
detail is recorded or retained. It is perhaps through the juggling or
balancing of these two extremes that a natural way into imaginative
illustration through observation is best achieved. To achieve this, in the
later stages of the field trip or location drawing project, it is useful to
begin to commit scenes and scenarios to visual memory and start
drawing them immediately ‘after the event’.
Having trained oneself to see more keenly, both through the process
of drawing from direct observation and that of ‘mentally drawing’
everyday scenes and objects when not able to spend time drawing, the
next big leap is to inject more of what you think and feel as well as
what you see into your drawing.
The fact that present-day students are exposed to the work of
thousands of illustrators from around the world through social media
can be both positive and negative. On the one hand, there is now
unprecedented instant access to an enormous array of influence from
wide-ranging visual cultures and traditions. On the other hand, it is
easier than ever to slip into imitative mannerism by (consciously or
unconsciously) for example, drawing foliage that owes more to the
decorative patterns of a particularly admired picturebook-maker than
personal experience of the real world. Developing and drawing from
visual memory can help to counter this, not only by building a personal
‘library’ of forms – the folds in clothes as the wearer’s body moves, the
shapes of particular plants, trees or buildings – but also by identifying
one’s own unique visual and social or narrative preoccupations through
observing people’s gestures and interactions with one another and their
environments.
While trying to get to grips with this kind of drawing, it is very easy
to become discouraged when drawings emerge that inevitably lack the
 assurance or ‘safety net’ of observation. But, as with all drawing, it is
essential to persevere. The making of ‘bad’ drawings is a key
component of the learning process.

Kristin Roskifte fills sketchbooks with drawings of people, both alone and in groups. For her, drawing
from observation, immediate memory or other references has merged into a single language. Her
drawings are all based on real people, many of whom find their way into her books.
 Drawing from memory
‘Drawings made from memory are very different…the
drawings will inevitably manifest on paper in a
different way, emerging through the filter of memory
and feelings about the subject’

Successful memory drawing is based on a particularly acute kind of close

observation that, for most, has to be learned. Many who aspire to draw well
will say that they already take a keen interest in the visual world around them
and have no problem in ‘seeing’. But learning to look in a way that is
specific to the retention of visual information involves, for want of a better
term, ‘mental drawing’. Notwithstanding Edward Ardizzone’s faith in
‘drawing a thing over and over again until it looks right’ as the method by
which illustrators find their way, perhaps the most commonly accepted
mantra about the relationship between visual memory and imagination is that
‘you cannot draw a thing out of your head if you do not first take the trouble
to put it there’. Although such sentiments are firmly rooted in traditions of so-
called ‘realist’ approaches to illustration, they are still relevant in today’s
world of myriad idiosyncratic visual languages. So the importance of the
process of habitual mental drawing cannot be overstated.
When deciding that you are going to draw a particular person or object
after encountering it, it is necessary to first learn to look in a very specific
way, quickly committing key shapes and their relationships to each other to
memory, by imagining that you are drawing them with your eyes and brain
rather than with a pencil. Once the inevitably demoralizing early results can
be put behind you, perseverance usually pays off. After some time, it
becomes increasingly natural and habitual to look in this way: really seeing
the line of a shoulder through a head, the overall shape of someone bending
to pick something up or the unfamiliar outline of a quarter-view face seen
from behind, with the tip of the nose just visible beyond the cheekbone.
Ardizzone did concede that:
 To acquire a good visual memory and knowledge another practice
is essential: the practice of really looking at things and trying to
commit them to memory. In this context the keeping of an
illustrated diary helps enormously. If every young student would jot
down something of what happens to him or interests him each day
and illustrate it with a small drawing done from memory, he would
find the combination of words and drawing a most useful exercise.
Over time, as this process of building ways of seeing and resultant visual
knowledge evolves, the registering of tone, colour and atmosphere – the
more subjective responses – become increasingly important. Drawings made
from memory are very different in nature from those made from observation.
Even if the intention had been to convey a scene as accurately as possible,
the drawings will inevitably manifest on paper in a different way, emerging
through the filter of memory and feelings about the subject. The line itself
will be imbued with a different character, often revealing new possibilities
and directions. As this approach to drawing matures, it can in turn feed back
into direct observational drawing.
Edward Ardizzone was a great champion of the anecdotal visual journal, and kept one himself. His
Diary of a Holiday Afloat was published in the eleventh issue of the popular Saturday Book
(Hutchinson, 1951).
 ‘Drawing…is very much in connection with you
and your feeling and your mood, and the result is
affected by it’

Yann Kebbi: An
organic approach

The symbiosis between observation and imagination for many

illustrators is particularly well evidenced through the work of artist,
illustrator and graphic novelist Yann Kebbi. At a time when editorial
illustration in particular can look somewhat ‘flat’, the organic
aesthetic of his work stands out as determinedly and defiantly
drawn. The connections between his sketchbooks and his published
works are clearly evident, but perhaps more complex than at first
sight.
Kebbi initially studied Applied Art, which he says gave him a
good foundation, followed by a two-year degree in Illustration, both
at École Estienne with a six-month exchange stay at Parsons School
in New York City. He then studied at the École Nationale
Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where he says the fields were more
integrated. ‘I kept on pushing and finding my thing and doing other
processes like etching, monoprint, silkscreen printing, digital...’.
Kebbi draws a great deal in his sketchbooks on location. In an
interview with the Cartoon Museum of Basel, he explains:
When you draw from life, there is a moment, sometimes you’re
in the subway or you’re outside, it starts raining, you are forced to
draw – it’s not like being in the studio with a sheet of paper….
Everything is interesting to draw, it’s just a matter of how you are
going to represent or approach it.... But they nourish each other. If I
feel my studio work is getting a bit ‘lazy’, I go back outside. But for
narrative work I don’t do a ‘research phase’ where I draw outside
and take the drawings back to the studio to work from.
Elaborating on his drawing-based, organic approach to
illustration, Kebbi says:
My main concern is with the process of drawing itself. I think
this organic feeling comes from the fact that my images are
constructed with the intention of keeping it partly ‘sketchy’ or not
hiding the process of construction, but also from the fact that in the
‘illustration world’ of images applied to a purpose like editorial or
communication, something very easy to read is expected. I guess
observation has been the main influence on that lively approach, but
also the idea of not being too conformist, and is varying the
techniques, scale, applications of contexts where my works could
evolve.
Am I both a ‘fine artist’ and an ‘illustrator’? That’s a
distinction I have trouble making, but I guess the straight answer is
‘yes’. I think the two, if they were to be compared, are intertwined.
For me it is more a matter of ‘where the drawing/image is going to
be used’, which of course influences the result. I truly believe doing
just one thing, evolving in just one of these ‘frames’ is both
frustrating and limiting – creatively and financially.
Maybe this assertion comes from the fact that I am not a good
illustrator, in the sense that communicating a clear idea isn’t really
a big concern. I think conveying an emotion, a feeling, something
funny, abstract, is more important and should be more looked for in
editorial works. In that regard, I think my work might, maybe, cross
more easily the bridge of ‘illustration’ to ‘fine art’, as it is more
focused on the form and what that form conveys than using codes to
create a meaning. You also go where people accept your work, I
think... I really don’t like that separation between ‘illustration’ and
‘fine arts’, I believe this is an old debate that has very little to do
with the reality of the process.
An editorial illustration from M le Magazine du Monde, on the subject of picnicking.
 From Howdy, an exhibition and book based on Kebbi’s three-month road trip across
America (Galerie Champaka, Paris, 2015).

Working to commission is very exciting, it is a challenge, because the

timing is short, because someone directly contacts you and recognizes a
sense in your work enough to ask you to create. It can also be very
frustrating when either the brief isn’t easy to adapt, or is very directed.
The art director feels your work would match a subject, so they project
something onto the result. That allows efficiency, but also creates a big
problem for me: it doesn’t allow you to evolve. And that’s fine, it just
means, in my opinion, that it is not in regular commissioned work that
your drawing can evolve. And evolving is imperative in my opinion.
What’s the point of doing the same thing over and over again? You grow
weary.
 Drawing, or creating in a more general way, is a very instinctive
process, a need. So it means it is very much in connection with you and
your feeling and your mood, and the result is affected by it. So there is
something strange to me in trying to control the result at all cost. I am
not speaking about narrative processes like comic books for example.
That is an entirely different matter for me, in the fact that the drawing is
there to support a story.
To be honest, it is not often that I feel truly satisfied with a
commissioned work compared to a drawing I would do for something I
truly believe in. But again, I think the two are intertwined, because it is
‘personal work’ that brings the commission in the first place, and
sometimes the work that is commissioned allows you to take time for
more personal work. It’s a back and forth.
I believe a good drawing is lively. I think movement is the key, in the
process and in the result. Things that are too tight, too nice, I don’t
know...it is dangerous to produce something too sophisticated, you can
end up trapped. Actually, my drawings are often quite constructed and
thought out in advance, so if I was a bit cynical I’d say that apparent
‘raw’ quality is in fact a trick. But balancing the aim of a communicative
drawing, applied to a purpose, with maintaining a sense of exploration
isn’t easy, because in a way the two things are kind of opposite.
What does ‘drawing’ mean to me? It’s a necessity.

Sketchbook pages.
A spread from Kebbi’s graphic novel Lontano: Fondation Kebbi (Actes Sud, 2019).
 ‘The shackles fall away and drawing takes place
for drawing’s sake without it being a cog in a
bigger project’

Simon Bartram:
Monday Man

One of the most outstanding draughtsmen working in illustration

today, Simon Bartram is a highly successful picturebook-maker, best
known for his book series featuring ‘Bob’ the genial astronaut and
his football-related children’s books, such as Up for the Cup!
(Templar, 2014). Figure drawing has always been central to his
practice as an illustrator, but in recent years he has also taken time
to work solely for himself. His visual ideas predominantly take the
form of intense busts or full-figure studies of men from his native
northeast England.
‘I always wanted to “do art”’, he says, ‘but I didn’t really know
how to go about it as a career. I just wanted to draw.’ He had been a
keen consumer of comics in childhood and, as an avid football fan,
had been especially devoted to Roy of the Rovers. But the idea of it
being possible to be an illustrator only really occurred to him when
seeing the signatures of artists next to their work: ‘One of the first
to register with me was Schiaffino, who drew Hotshot Hamish. He
studied Visual Communication at Birmingham School of Art, where
he says he went to as many extra evening classes in life drawing as
he could; now, he works almost entirely from memory. Here, he
explains what the ‘discipline’ of drawing, in both its literal and
broader sense, means to him in relation to personal work and
applied illustration.
My approach to the discipline of drawing can be varied. Indeed,
the amount of ‘discipline’ required depends on the purpose of the
drawing. If I am working on a study for a subsequent painting, I
tend to carefully render a detailed, linear, almost technical sketch
that will function as a skeleton for the picture. Such drawings are
meticulously plotted. I know the destination and I will refine it until
I achieve my goal.
However, lots of other drawings, particularly those in
sketchbooks, require much less ‘discipline’. In fact, for me, they
require a certain ‘switching off’ of conscious discipline. The
shackles fall away and drawing takes place for drawing’s sake
without it being a cog in a bigger project. Muscle memory takes over
and I tend not to tighten up or worry. The destination of the drawing
is unclear, which is very liberating. Often, nothing good emerges,
which is fine as all that has been invested is a little time. However,
sometimes, a little gem might appear, and it may surprise you and
lead you along new paths in the future. In this regard sketchbooks
are vital. From the first page to the last, small, incremental changes
to style or technique or colour can add up to a bigger, almost
unconscious change to the direction of your work.
The drawing shown here was one of six I did one Monday
morning. Four of them ended up in the bin. Two of them I was
pleased with. A lot of my pictures at the moment feature a certain
kind of male face. I enjoy playing with proportions. This one was
drawn from my imagination using charcoal and carbon pencils. It is
roughly A3 in size. Other times I will work from a piece of reference
material, although rarely will I slavishly reproduce a photo. Reality
always needs a tweak in my opinion, even if it’s just a little tweak.
For most of my adult life I have worked as an illustrator,
particularly in the field of children’s books. More recently, however,
I have been working on a series of personal painting projects. For
many years I have had a backlog of pictures building up in my head
and I feel now is the right time to get them down in paint.

In recent years, Simon Bartram has found himself increasingly engaged with self-
directed drawings and paintings of a particular type of male head, which he explores
with intense focus and detail.
 ‘Now when I begin work on a project, I always
draw from imagination first, “feeling” my way into
it’

Bill Bragg: Making the

links

Bill Bragg’s award-winning work across book and editorial

illustration, graphic novels, painting and most recently children’s
picturebooks is widely admired. His imaginative, atmospheric
artwork is rooted in sound draughtsmanship and design, and his
carefully considered views on the relationship between observation
and imagination in visual thinking are highly illuminating. Bragg’s
father was a graphic designer and his mother an art teacher with a
love of drawing and painting. He feels that his own work quite
naturally straddles those two fields. Drawing was encouraged, but
never forcibly so:
I was into all sorts of things. I loved making things, always
using my hands. My parents had a nice way of encouraging subtly:
they would leave things lying around for me to look at that they
thought might interest me – design magazines, articles and so on.
And I grew up aware of the lifestyle of freelance work, my father’s
studio full of fascinating equipment and materials lying around –
French curves and so on that would frequently ‘find their way’ into
my bedroom.
At school he always felt that others were technically ‘better at
drawing’ than he was: ‘But I enjoyed it beyond the technical
proficiency side – it was the adventure of drawing really.’ He
enrolled on the Art Foundation course at Newcastle-under-Lyme
Art School and, like many others, found this stage of art school
education particularly joyful:
It was a fantastic course. Drawing ran through everything – life
drawing, location drawing and experimenting with all sorts of
media and processes. And the fun and camaraderie of everyone
doing what they love. I didn’t really come out of the sketchbook at
that stage. I did also do a lot of photography, and photography has
continued to be a significant influence on my work – Josef
Koudelka, for example, his way of his way of composing images and
graphic use of light and shadow.
After Foundation, Bragg studied Illustration as a main option
within Communication Design at Central Saint Martins in London.
He continued to work predominantly in sketchbooks. Sharing
accommodation with jazz musicians, he found himself doing a lot of
drawing at jazz gigs, where it was too dark to see the paper of his
sketchbook and he was forced to draw ‘blind’, one of the most
intense forms of observational drawing. Later, while studying for his
MA at the Royal College of Art, one drawing project had particular
significance for Bragg with regard to the key issue for many
illustrators: linking observation and imagination as naturally and
organically as possible. In this three-stage project, the students
were first given a list of interesting, iconic places and buildings in
London along with detailed written descriptions of each, their
histories and functions, and invited to make drawings from the
descriptions. Stage two involved visiting the actual locations and
drawing directly from observation. The final stage of the project
required the students to make drawings of the venues back in the
studio, from memory. As Bragg explains, the project cleverly
facilitated the building of links between imagination, observation
and memory: ‘There was something quite scientific about it in a
way, exploring emotions, atmosphere, sight…understanding that we
are always using one or other of these.’
Linking observation and imagination has played a key role in the evolution of Bill
Bragg’s illustration work, as seen in these images of Wilton’s Music Hall, London,
made while Bragg was a student at the Royal College of Art.
 The preparatory rough (left) for Bragg’s front cover (right) for The Illustrated Dust
Jacket: 1920–1970 (Thames & Hudson, 2017).

Projects such as these, underpinned by long periods as a student

spent enjoying ‘the luxury of being able to draw from life and
experiment and play in the sketchbook’ have played a key role in
forming Bragg’s working methods when drawing for illustration as a
professional illustrator today:
Now when I begin work on a project, I always draw from
imagination first, ‘feeling’ my way into it. There’s a kind of ‘muscle
memory’ at work – hand and brain. Of course, there will then often be
the need for more information, and so I have to go back to observation or
reference. Occasionally, if the time and place of the subject is
unfamiliar, there is a need for research at the start but usually there is a
way in.
When illustrating Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories for the
Folio Society, I found myself basing the setting and the atmosphere of
one particular illustration on a place I remember from childhood. I was
then able to ‘layer on’ the specific period detail. Creating a convincing
illusion is the key thing. Sometimes there needs to be a degree of visual
‘truth’ underpinning the emotional truth. I guess it’s a bit like staging a
play, the need for a certain amount of authentic detail. Light is very
important. A shadow or reflection invites the viewer to imagine its
source and gives a sense of there being a larger world beyond the frame.
The balance of light and shadow and how it can be used to strengthen a
composition is something I often think about. For this reason, my initial
sketches are always in black and white. I think the influence of
photography comes through here again.
As an illustrator you could be required to draw anything, and this can
often feel quite daunting. Even after twenty yearsI rarely feel confident
before I start a project and often think ‘I don’t know whether I can do
this’. But once I start, the feelings of trepidation fall away as I become
absorbed and transported by what I’m drawing. When I get ‘in the zone’
the hours disappear.

The strong sense of place in this sketch of Erith Yacht Club grows from a particular,
personal connection with the location.
Bragg’s preliminary sketch and final digital artwork for Arthur Conan-Doyle’s ‘The
Captain of the Pole-Star’, in Ghostly Tales: Spine-Chilling Stories of the Victorian Age
(Chronicle Books, 2017).
 Sketchbooks, visual journals
and doodles
‘In this private world we can take risks, make
“mistakes”, make “bad” drawings and mess, explore the
properties of different tools and materials without fear
of judgment’

For many illustrators, the sketchbook is the place where the personal visual
vocabulary begins to assert itself, a private place where drawing from direct
observation can mix freely with flights of visual fancy, doodles, notes,
uninhibited mark-making, shopping lists and bus tickets. Doodles are
especially important. As with handwriting, each individual will tend to
display a particular graphic identity when making marks on paper while their
primary concentration is perhaps on something other than the marks
themselves. Some will doodle controlled geometric shapes, others softly
flowing rhythmic patterns. Some doodles may form into pictorial
representations simply by building on unexpected connections. Many will
remain abstract. But in any event, this process of ‘unconscious’ and
unselfconscious mark-making can play an important role in underpinning the
illustrator’s emerging visual language.
Each of us will use the sketchbook in our own particular way. For most
of us, whether as amateurs, students or professionals, drawing is as fraught
with psychological issues as it is with those of a technical or practical nature
– fear of failure and being judged, self-consciousness – the outcomes being
tied up with a sense of self-worth. But in this private world we can take
risks, make ‘mistakes’, make ‘bad’ drawings and mess, explore the
properties of different tools and materials without fear of judgment. There is
always a danger of wanting to ‘make a beautiful book’ and this usually leads
to a completely counterproductive paralysis. Not everyone likes to work in
sketchbooks, and many professional illustrators no longer have time to use
them. But for many, especially students and other learners, they are the key to
progress, as a place where the things that interest us visually, emotionally
and conceptually can be recorded, played around with, mixed up, developed
and occasionally reflected upon. Crucially, the sketchbook is often the place
where natural links are made between observation and imagination or
memory, and therefore much of what goes on in there will find its way,
directly or indirectly, into later applied work.
These linear doodles were made by illustrator and educator Nigel Robinson during an art-school board
meeting. They meander between the abstract and geometric, pattern-making and representation.
Pages from Hayley Wells’s sketchbook, showing the close relationship between drawing from
observation and developing character studies for narrative illustration, alongside detailed colour planning.
The edges of a stretched sheet of watercolour paper, outside the image area, are often used to test the
colours and tonality of washes. Here, James Dawson’s test marks gradually formed themselves into an
extended pictorial doodle.
Part of a page of studies for a narrative illustration project by Gill Smith.

A spread from Marina Ruiz’s sketchbook. Sensitively rendered experiments with pencil and watercolour
are scattered with notes and aides mémoire.
 ‘Doodles have a private life of their own, and they
more or less draw themselves. Perhaps some of
our creative expression comes from our
unconscious minds’

John Vernon Lord: The

journals

In his dual roles as former Professor of Illustration at the University

of Brighton and a leading illustrator whose award-winning projects
have included the ‘unillustratable’ James Joyce novels Ulysses and
Finnegans Wake and his own best-selling picturebook, The Giant
Jam Sandwich, John Vernon Lord is a much-loved influence on the
illustration world. Alongside his illustration practice and his work in
higher education, he has kept personal journals, diaries and
notebooks in one form or another since his days as a student at
Salford Art College in the late 1950s. He confesses to being
obsessive about these and unable to break the habit. He says that
on the rare occasions that he revisits them, he is invariably
disappointed by them, echoing André Gide’s observations of his
journals:
What good is this journal? I cling to these pages as to something
fixed among so many fugitive things. I oblige myself to write
anything whatever in them just so I do it regularly every day.
But for the observer, the privilege of a glimpse into this private
world reveals much about the way Vernon Lord’s visual vocabulary
has evolved, and about the importance of the activity rather
reductively termed ‘doodling’. He perfectly sums up the desire
harboured by so many, to transfer more of the characteristically
unselfconscious mark-making of the sketchbook or notebook into
the arena of the ‘finished’ illustration for reproduction:
Over the years I have doodled at many meetings at art college,
polytechnic and university. It is a compulsion that I can hardly
avoid. Doodling is a way of aiding concentration and it soothes any
tension that sometimes arises during a discussion. The spontaneous
action of doodling not only helps me listen and take in what is being
said but it also assists my own involvement in discussion. It is
therefore important that I do not take the doodle too seriously as to
its quality. It must be aimless and I must not improve it or worry
about how well or badly it is developing during the drawing of it.
Doodles have a private life of their own, and they more or less draw
themselves. Perhaps some of our creative expression comes from
our unconscious minds.
The themes of an agenda item, or a remark, might prompt me to
come up with symbols related to the discussion at hand during a
meeting, but some of the doodles are populated with meanings and
significances that I have now largely forgotten about. Some of the
images, however, are capable of bringing a meeting vividly back to
life! The doodles do not necessarily relate to the essence of a
meeting, but now and again a frustration may be evident.
Consistent images are constantly brought to the surface when
doodling. Prevailing symbols seem to appear regularly, and I cannot
account for this. There are men with elaborate hats, wearing ruffs,
and many sporting a wide range of moustaches. Fish feature a lot
too, as do birds. Many doodles are populated with pencils and pens;
sometimes these instruments are seen in the act of drawing or
writing independently, without the help of a guiding hand. Wine
glasses and cups keep appearing, as well as buildings and doorways.
Letters and numbers crop up regularly. Arrows, darts, screws, nails
and keys are frequently employed as penetrating instruments.
Question marks and exclamation marks are regular signs that turn
up in doodles. Plants, trees, books and shoes seem to be favoured
subjects too. Light bulbs shine forth and sometimes little explosions
take place. I do not care to interpret these symbols for myself or
attempt to unveil their meanings. That is for others.
The doodles are essentially aimless drawings. They allow for a
great deal of intuition, which my illustrations so often lack in terms
of graphic approach. They release in me a kind of automatic
drawing that the illustrator in me envies.
 Pages from John Vernon Lord’s numerous notebooks and diaries. Vernon Lord has
kept highly individual, intensely detailed illustrated journals for most of his adult life,
each carefully numbered and dated. They form a unique record of a lifetime of
drawing, illustrating and teaching. They also illustrate the importance of thinking
through drawing. These pages come from 1976, 2002, 2004 and 2008, and were
published in John’s Journal Jottings (Inky Parrot Press, 2009).
 ‘I am continuously learning from the preliminary
drawings found in the sketchbooks of great artists
such as Anthony van Dyck, Käthe Kollwitz and J.
M. W. Turner’

Sally Dunne:
Sketchbooks and me

After winning the Victoria and Albert Museum Student Illustrator

of the Year Award in 2020 with her illustrations from the Kakuma
refugee camp in Kenya, Sally Dunne has gone on to work on a
number of high-profile commissions with the Folio Society. The first,
published in 2021, was to illustrate Agatha Christie’s Crooked
House, one of the author’s own favourite novels. Her cover design
was executed in watercolour and the interior illustrations in pastel
and pencil. She followed this up immediately by tackling Georgette
Heyer’s 1958 Regency romance, Venetia, also in pastels, which she
describes as challenging, but from which she feels she has learned a
great deal.
Dunne is an illustrator for whom drawing and observation are
particularly crucial. She is a prolific sketchbook user, which forms a
foundation to her approach to illustration in general.
My sketchbooks are often filled with a combination of visual
notes, drawings from life, imagined characters, compositional ideas
and developing storyboards. I keep a sketchbook with me wherever I
go, in case an idea springs to mind, or a particular landscape,
character or moment captures my attention. These studies may later
inspire a more finished piece of work.
 I would consider some of my sketchbooks to be visual diaries
that reveal subconscious motifs. For this reason, it can feel quite
daunting exhibiting or sharing them with others! However, I do feel
that revealing the working process can be an invaluable resource
for others. When an artist exhibits or shares their sketchbooks, they
are revealing their scruffy workings-out, preliminary sketches, the
gradual evolution of an imagined character or the germ of an idea
that is yet to be fully realized. I am continuously learning from the
preliminary drawings found in the sketchbooks of great artists such
as Anthony van Dyck, Käthe Kollwitz and J. M. W. Turner.
I draw from life as much as possible, as I find that details from
sketchbook studies of landscapes, portraits and interiors can inspire
or contribute authentically to an imagined world. For example, I
am particularly fascinated by the various ways that light and
shadow informs and enhances the atmosphere and emotion in an
image. With my sketchbook to hand, I can quickly note down, for
instance, how sunlight casts particular shadows on grass or how it
highlights a person’s face and the folds in their clothing. I can later
utilize these details in my imagined work to help make the fictional
world I am drawing look more convincing or believable.
Working in sketchbooks is an invaluable part of my practice for
three main reasons. The first and perhaps most immediate reason is
the functionality of a sketchbook. Its portability enables me to take
visual notes anywhere. Secondly, the privacy of a sketchbook can
encourage naturally cautious illustrators like myself to try out ideas
within the secure parameters of the pages. I feel I create some of my
best and most uninhibited work in my sketchbooks. On occasion, I
have started a small drawing in the corner of my sketchbook that
spontaneously developed into a finished piece of artwork, an
unexpected but ultimately very satisfying result. Finally, a
sketchbook is an insightful visual record of the artist’s working
process that can be very instructive and valuable for other artists.
We are able to observe the sketchbook owner’s technique and follow
their thought processes. Through studying their preliminary
drawings, we can understand and observe how their initial studies
progressed into final works of art.
Sketchbooks can also encourage the illustrator to creatively
organize and arrange their ideas. Working in a sketchbook is an
exciting opportunity to design, collage and arrange information.
Many pages of my sketchbooks are crammed full with seemingly
random combinations of individual, observed or imagined studies.
Sometimes I will find ways to visually link these separate ideas
retrospectively in order to discover a connecting theme or idea.
A sketchbook is a private place to experiment. This can feel very
liberating, as we do not have to consider an audience’s opinion of
our work. For this reason, there is a risk that our best work remains
hidden away within their safe boundaries. We may also encounter a
common dilemma: ‘how do I recreate the same energy and
spontaneity in the final artwork?
Sally Dunne’s pocket-sized sketchbooks always accompany her, and are used for
multiple forms of information-gathering and idea-developing. Direct observational
studies are mixed with quick visual idea notes and occasional highly finished
artworks.
 ‘The more times you try to draw it over again, the
more distant you get from that moment of
creation in response to the narrative’

Alexis Deacon:
Drawing, thinking and
the psychology of
‘finished’

Alexis Deacon is widely admired for his astonishing, almost

anachronistic drawing skills, generally executed with a humble
pencil. Of the leading illustrators of today, it could perhaps be
argued that Deacon is one for whom the line between drawing for
illustration and drawing as illustration becomes most blurred. He
grew up in an artistic family and says that he was ‘always obsessed
with drawing’. His sculptor father’s studio was outside the home,
but he was allowed to be there and get on with drawing and ‘not be
a burden’.
When, after graduating from art school, his first encounters with
publishers invariably led to feedback on his ‘finished’ illustrations
being along the lines of ‘can you make it more like your
sketchbooks’, he developed strategies for limiting the steps
between first marks and ‘finals’. It is a scenario that may be only
too familiar to many who struggle to retain in their illustration work
the vitality of the very first exploratory marks. Those much-
admired sketchbooks are used less now, and in different ways:
 I don’t really use sketchbooks so much now. They were
talismanic things.... But I didn’t want to get into that ‘show us your
sketchbook, who’s got the best sketchbook’ competitive thing. After
a period when I couldn’t work because of an illness, I decided I
wanted my illustration work to be the sketchbooks. Now they are
more of a support tool. I do have one with me most days, just for
getting something down when needed – filling in gaps in
knowledge.
You have these problems in your head, stuff that you’ve tried to
draw and struggled with, you see something and think ‘that would
make a fantastic drawing’ and if you don’t have any materials with
you, you just try to memorize what you can in the moment. I think it
helps if you’ve had a specific problem or question and then you see
the answer to it out in the world.
Looking back to those early encounters with publishers, I think I
internalized it. I did see the sense in it. Once I’d embraced why they
were responding better to the original sketch, I sort of made it a
life’s mission to try and invent processes that allow me to remain as
close to that original moment as possible. I think it’s maybe
something to do with what Ardizzone was getting at – when you’re
drawing the rough, if you’re an illustrator of a certain type, the
story’s happening, you know – it’s happening in front of your eyes.
And you’re making a lot of intuitive decisions about how big
something is, what else is present in the scene, what position they’re
in, and everything is narrative because you are just trying to tell the
story, that’s your only concern. And then the more times you try to
draw it over again, the more distant you get from that moment of
creation in response to the narrative, the more redundant
considerations and those questions of self-worth and craftsmanship
and so on start to creep in. It took me a long time to realize that
things that didn’t take ages to do had value. I still think I hide
behind technique sometimes – I still want to impress people at
heart. Working in animation and comics more recently has been
very effective in breaking some of those things down, because the
demands of the schedule are such that you either ‘get it’ in the time
that you have, or you don’t. There’s no time for fretting, you’re just
on to the next thing.
Soonchild was published by Walker Books in 2012. The author,
Russell Hoban, died before the book was published, but not before
he had received a printed copy. His particular brand of magic
realism provided plenty of scope for Deacon to use the full range of
his visual vocabulary. Over sixty illustrations, ranging from full
double-page spreads to small ‘drop-ins’, are arranged throughout
the text (originally written as a freestanding work) with an element
of visual pace that contributes to the sense of increasing drama.
A page from one of Alexis Deacon’s sketchbooks, showing working notes, dialogues
and the kinds of drawings that proved impossible to better or replicate in his final
illustrations, leading him to create strategies to cut out the ‘leap’ from sketchbook
to final piece.
 Examples of Alexis Deacon’s original drawings for Soonchild (text by Russell Hoban,
Walker Books, 2012), used as the final artworks for the book, shown with the
printed spreads.

I think it was Walker who suggested illustrations. Hoban was very

supportive. He’d worked with many other illustrators and he had been an
illustrator himself once, a very good one. He was very open to
collaboration. There were occasionally things that he suggested or vetoed
but he was pretty ‘hands-off’ most of the time.
 Usually when I’m given a text I try to think about what illustration
might add to it. And one of the things I noticed when reading Soonchild
was that the progression of the text wasn’t obviously narrative. It was
quite episodic. So I wanted to give the audience a feeling that they were
moving towards something, and that things were escalating. Actually, I
now realize that there is escalation in the text. But the gathering pace in
the illustration was intentional.
The background tints of colour were suggested by Ben Norland (the
book’s designer). We wanted to mark phases in the text – it’s about a
shaman quest, and he goes deeper and deeper into this world to fix a
problem that he’s made by being an awful shaman. So we wanted to
somehow mark when a threshold had been crossed.
There were certain points that I felt were more important than
others. Again, I feel this is something that illustrations can really help
with. It’s like ‘searing’ certain moments in an audience’s mind so that
they can mark them as significant because they’re going to be ‘called
back’. So certain moments stand out and of course some you just feel ‘I
really must draw that’. The section where he dies I felt was the axis of
the book, so I treated it almost like a picturebook sequence.
For the drawings for Soonchild, Deacon used a combination of
charcoal, pencil and aquarelle pencil. Charcoal predominated, with
drawings made at a larger scale and heavily reduced. That, he says,
dictated aspects of how the illustrations would look: ‘Charcoal’s a good
medium for large scale, it works very comfortably. I mix scales so it’s not
immediately too obvious at what scale it was drawn’. He works standing
up at an angled architect’s drawing table – originally for physical
reasons, but as time has gone by, just through preference. Pencil and
charcoal continue to be his first love:
With the comic that I’ve been working on recently I started working
with ink and brush, but then I switched to pencil on a sort of drafting
film to get a very dark line, so that it wouldn’t be a problem for
reproduction. I much prefer the sensation of drawing with a pencil or
charcoal as compared to ink because I like the grading, the pressure.
Pressure is such an important part of the way I draw and I haven’t been
able to replicate that with a brush (except with a brush-pen that’s just
about to run out, and at that point you have the same flexibility of
making a mark that can be either very, very light or very bold). The
humble pencil – you go through phases of becoming particularly fond of
one or other. I suppose seventy to eighty per cent of my thinking is in
line.
I don’t know – those lines…the moment of creation of a story…the
feeling that you get when you’re making a mark, the emotional
connection that you feel as you are drawing, that’s always felt like the
essential part of it to me. Then the rest of it is just ‘add-ons’ – for
example if there has to be colour or it has to be a certain shape or size
according to the publishers’ demands, you just do the minimum
necessary to get through. The act of drawing has always been the
essential thing for me. It’s the bit that I enjoy the most and that’s where
the value is.
 CHAPTER 4

Drawing and Applied Illustration

The ways in which drawing relates to illustration are many, both in a

general sense and also in the way approaches and attitudes to drawing
differ from illustrator to illustrator, as we have seen throughout the
previous sections of this book. For some professional practitioners,
drawing feeds seamlessly into their applied illustration work and
illustration feeds back equally seamlessly into drawing. For others, the
connection is more nuanced. Now that illustrators have such a range of
possible media and platforms at their disposal – digital and traditional
– this can be particularly apparent. Drawing in the literal sense may not
be explicitly visible in the end product, but its presence may be manifest
in the underlying draughtsmanship that anchors its design and
construction. The act of drawing in the more literal sense may be used
for primarily functional purposes, testing ideas and approaches that
cannot be fully evaluated until they are roughed out in visual form. The
analogy with poetry is perhaps once again relevant here. The expression
‘How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’ has been attributed
to various writers including E. M. Forster and Graham Wallas, although
both credited it originally to André Gide, himself quoting an apocryphal
old lady who was pooh-poohing the idea of logic. It resonates naturally
with the concept of ‘thinking through drawing’ – drawn lines or written
words forming on paper, needing to be seen, heard out loud and ‘felt’ as
they emerge, often surprising their author and impacting on the
subsequent direction of the drawing or poem.
In its final form, modern illustration can often be shape-based in
execution rather than relying on the ubiquitous line of previous
generations. This seems to be the case particularly in editorial work,
where strong and simple graphic shapes currently predominate,
especially on screen. Many of the artists in this field work digitally,
while others fuse digital technology with traditional approaches such as
printmaking, creating effects that are informed by and refer back to
processes such as screenprinting, lithography and linocut. Jon
McNaught’s work can be seen as an example of such fusion.
In narrative and sequential illustration, such as authorial
picturebooks and graphic novels, whatever medium or media the artist
uses for the final work, drawing still plays a key role in developing
page designs, balancing visual pace and structure and especially in
developing convincing characterization. One of the most common
remarks one hears from working illustrators is along the lines of ‘I wish
I had more time to draw from observation’. But for most, it is the
intense period of drawing during their formal art education that forms
the foundation of everything that they do today. Many speak of ‘muscle
memory’ or use the analogy of driving a car to describe the
unconscious, tacit knowledge that long hours of drawing from
observation has instilled deep within them. The diverse and wide-
ranging application of drawing to applied illustration is examined in
this final chapter primarily through the observations of individual
specialist practitioners.
A page from Jon McNaught’s graphic novel Dockwood (Nobrow, 2012).
 Editorial and magazine
illustration
‘A field of illustration that demands not just a solid
grounding in drawing, but an ability to digest and
process written arguments or speculations in often
arcane subject areas’

The term ‘editorial illustration’ is used to describe illustration that is

commissioned to accompany writing in newspapers and magazines. Its
function is partly to give some visual impact to a page that would otherwise
be very text-heavy, but also to supply a visual interpretation of the content of
an article that may be dealing with, for example, abstract concepts or debates
and opinions around politics, finance, science, sport or culture and society. It
is a field of illustration that demands not just a solid grounding in drawing,
but an ability to digest and process written arguments or speculations in often
arcane subject areas and represent them through imagery that gives a clear
visual ‘way in’ to the topic.
This area is one that very often requires the artist to employ visual
metaphor in order to distil the text elegantly into a single image that
embodies the concepts explored. Often, this can involve the use of figures of
speech, which are themselves often very visual (‘digging a hole for himself’,
‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, ‘I felt like a fish out of water’). Food and
lifestyle illustration has tended to be superseded by photography in
publications in the recent past, but historically these have also been
important mainstays for illustrators. For much of the last century, magazine
and journal covers were also adorned with bespoke commissioned
illustrations, providing a major platform for artists in times of high
circulation. Special supplements in newspapers or magazines such as
Christmas Specials, ‘The Book Supplement’ or ‘Travel Special’ continue to
be sources of work for editorial illustrators, with art editors keen to make
these sections stand out visually as much as possible.

The illustrator and printmaker Robert Tavener designed numerous excellent covers for magazines
through the mid-twentieth century.
For much of the last century, many illustrators were kept in regular work by popular magazines,
especially for short romantic fiction. This spread is by Trevor Willoughby for a 1957 edition of Homes
and Gardens.
 ‘When a client sends an editorial commission, I will
grab a pencil, open my sketchbook and read the
text. My head is filled with random imagery and
concepts as I read the article, and I make quick
thumbnail sketches as I read‘

David Humphries:
Newton’s Cradle or ‘the
biggest hum’

David Humphries studied Illustration at Cambridge and Central

Saint Martin’s schools of art. Drawing from observation played a
major role in his early art education. A large part of his work as an
illustrator now is within editorial illustration for newspapers and
magazines. Here, he explains in detail the subtle connections
between a background in drawing and the ability to explore and
creatively exploit the complex visual grammar of this field of
illustration. The drawing shown opposite is from an intensely
personal series that he made as a student and while his father was in
hospital.
My dad suffered a serious brain injury while I was at college.
Initially he was in a coma, and he remained in hospital for a
considerable time. I was very close to my dad, and I have never had
the ability to describe the pain and trauma in words. It wasn’t a
conscious decision to draw him. At the time, I drew constantly and I
took my sketchbook everywhere. It didn’t occur to me not to draw
him.
 I love that everyone can draw, and drawings can be enjoyed by
everyone in every language. I remember reading an interview with a
Swedish illustrator who was asked ‘When did you start drawing?’,
and his answer to the interviewer was ‘When did you stop?’
I came to illustration by an unusual route. I began college as a
mechanical engineering student in Manchester.... My limited
attention span forced me to sit at the back of the lectures, reading
Viz and drawing puerile caricatures of the lecturers and unpopular
students with a biro on lined paper. Luckily, in my first student
house there were two really talented illustration students, and I
started hanging around with them, I bought a sketchbook and a
pencil, and the rest is history. I never got bored drawing pictures, it
was perfectly suited to all of my failings and personality traits. I
liked that every drawing was unique, and that there were
considerably more girls studying illustration than engineering.
I think clients use me for what happens in between my ears as
much as what happens at the end of my fingers. To communicate
visually, I try to combine and subvert visual cliché, I like to use
humour where it is appropriate. My work has evolved to allow me to
work to very tight deadlines – often under five hours. My shortest
deadline was twenty minutes! Intense concentration, ability to
hyper-focus for short periods…ability to make decisions and
communicate under pressure.
I suspect that the parts of my brain that I use when I draw have
grown or optimized to enable me to work more efficiently. Editorial
illustration is just professional Pictionary really, without friends
and alcohol. When a client sends an editorial commission, I will
grab a pencil, open my sketchbook and read the text. My head is
filled with random imagery and concepts as I read the article, and I
make quick thumbnail sketches as I read.
I don’t know whether this has always happened, or if this has
developed with experience, but the best ideas tend to resonate in my
head – like a tuning fork will resonate when placed next to a note of
the right frequency. I will describe the biggest ‘hum’ as the ‘main
concept’. I use this as a framework for the illustration. I can fine-
tune, subvert and wrap other concepts into the framework to make
the final illustration. I play with it until the deadline, and/or/if
everyone is happy.
In November 2015, I did a job for the Guardian newspaper
sports pages, illustrating an article about the apparent proliferation
of brain damage in retired professional footballers. The journalist
referred to medical research linking the small, repeated impacts of
heading a football to incidents of brain injury in retired players.
One of the numerous observational drawings David Humphries made during the
many hours he spent by his father’s hospital bedside. The drawings are moving in
their intimacy.
 Various editorial commissions undertaken by David Humphries.

A Newton’s Cradle is a 1980s executive toy. When a sphere at one end

is lifted and released, it strikes the stationary spheres, transmitting a
force through the stationary spheres that pushes the last sphere upwards.
It hummed loudly in my head because:
1. It is perfect for describing small repeated impacts over a long period
of time.
2. It was the right shape for the design format (landscape).
3. It has spheres that I could change into footballs.
I particularly liked the concept because the footballer would not be
able to stop heading the ball – the energy and momentum of the
Newton’s Cradle would create endless impacts. I usually grab references
from the internet to help me to compose the image into the allocated
space. Here, I added a footballer in a ‘diving header’ position. The West
Bromwich Albion kit is a reference to Jeff Astle, whose brain damage
was highlighted in this context. I tried to turn the Cradle’s frame into
goal posts and add the netting, but these ideas detracted from the main
concept. Played with it until 5.30 p.m. Sent artwork. Went to the pub.
I primarily consider drawing as visual communication. Sometimes it
is easy to forget that every drawing starts as a blank piece of paper or an
empty computer screen. Whereas thinking of an idea is like panning for
gold, it feels more like alchemy when I create a collection of marks and
shapes that communicates or entertains.
I have always found it difficult to mentally bridge the chasm between
my figurative drawing and my professional work; they do different
things. I have always been pragmatic, and conceptual imagery often
requires a graphic element that is absent in observational drawing,
though the skills involved are not mutually exclusive.
My illustration has always been shaped-based. Shapes enable me to
work quickly and efficiently. I like shapes; it may be the way I look at
things, or the way I think or make sense of the world. I create my
illustrations in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet. I use the lasso tool a
lot, it is very similar to drawing shapes with a pencil. Large, simple
shapes are ideally suited to short editorial deadlines, and they produce
bold images that print well. I am not sure whether I was attracted to
editorial illustration because of the way I work, or my work is a symptom
of editorial illustration.
Some of the most creative people I know are not artists. I have always
loved making and fixing things. I inherited this from my dad, who
understood how things work. I believe that this innate curiosity is linked
to creativity. These people can always draw – simple diagrams that
‘work’ – and this ability can be developed and honed. It is impossible to
draw a bike from memory unless you understand how it works.
When I was a student, I remember visiting an exhibition of drawings
at the Royal College of Art by Sir Isaac Newton and his contemporaries.
I was really annoyed that all of the scientists could draw better than me.
After the exhibition, when I was sitting under a tree in Hyde Park, an
iPhone dropped out of the sky and hit me on the head. At that moment it
occurred to me that very few modern illustrators have the technical
ability to make drawings of that quality, and it is the advent of
photography that has allowed drawing to disappear from the science
curriculum (and the majority of art schools). But the real loss is that the
act (and discipline) of describing things visually helps us to understand
their function and appreciate their beauty; merely pressing a button on a
camera or a phone just isn’t the same.
The impactful ‘Newton’s Cradle’ illustration for a Guardian newspaper article about
the increasing incidence of brain injury in retired footballers.
 Book illustration
‘The best illustration in this field is careful to avoid
duplicating or visualizing literally the writer’s words.
Often a more tangential approach is required,
suggesting mood, background or atmosphere’

The use of illustration for adult fiction, as distinct from young adult fiction,
children’s book illustration or picturebook-making, is perhaps less common
than it was in the past and tends to be confined primarily to publishers of
lavishly designed and produced collectable editions such as the Folio
Society in the UK and the Limited Editions Club in the US. That said, in
recent years book design and production generally has seen a noticeable
surge in print and production quality, with commercial books of all
categories needing to become much more desirable as objects in order to
compete with screen-based reading. Non-fiction hardback books in
particular have made increasing use of illustration, especially in fields such
as nature writing, lifestyle and travel, where book cover and jacket design
especially have once again become boom areas for illustrators.
Illustration for fiction can be a contentious area. Commissioning an artist
to add pictorial interpretations to a text that was originally conceived and
written as a stand-alone experience is not always welcome. Writers and
readers can sometimes feel that illustration intrudes on the reader’s
imagination. But the best illustration in this field is careful to avoid
duplicating or visualizing literally the writer’s words. Often a more
tangential approach is required, suggesting mood, background or atmosphere,
creating a counterpoint to the reading of words and augmenting the overall
aesthetic experience. Ardizzone touched on these issues in another rare
excursion into analysis in issue 11 of ARK, the iconic journal of the Royal
College of Art, in 1954:
The Function of an Illustrator: The illustrator has to add to the
work of the author. He has to explain something to the reader which
the author cannot say in words or has not the space to do so. His
illustrations should form an evocative visual background to the
story, a background which the reader can people with the
characters of the author. The suggestion and the hint are often
more important than the clear-cut statement. Don’t do too much of
the reader’s work for him; rather, help him to use his imagination.
Be careful of the dramatic scenes in a book. Violence and drama
are often better expressed in words. It is easy to fall into the trap of
being literary. The approach to illustration should be purely visual.
Edward McKnight Kauffer’s illustrations for Arnold Bennett’s Elsie and the Child (Cassell, 1929)
were produced using the technique of pochoir – stencils designed by the artist and hand-coloured at the
Curwen Press.
 ‘The crossover between her work as painter and
illustrator is seamless’

Evelyn Dunbar: Lyrical

non-fiction

The British painter and illustrator Evelyn Dunbar is perhaps best

known for her paintings as an official war artist, in particular
depicting the activities of the Women’s Land Army during the
Second World War. In 1938, the publisher Noel Carrington, a great
supporter and promoter of artists whose work he admired, invited
Dunbar to illustrate the new edition of A Gardener’s Diary, the
previous edition of which had been illustrated by Edward Bawden.
Carrington was responsible for commissioning young talents such as
Eric Ravilious, Bawden and Kathleen Hale through his work as
editor at the publication Country Life and his development of the
highly successful Puffin Picture Books. Dunbar produced lyrical,
expressive line drawings of working figures for the tailpieces of A
Gardener’s Diary, rendered in simple line and informed by her love
of gardening and the countryside.
In 2013, a batch of preparatory studies, along with a treasure
trove of other work by the artist, was discovered. Often the
preparatory sketches and working drawings of illustrators in the
past were discarded, as indeed was the final artwork for
reproduction, which was often seen as serving no further purpose
after it had been photographed for reproduction. One particularly
distressing story saw a substantial body of original work by a highly
respected twentieth-century illustrator being rescued from a
rubbish skip after her death; fortunately, it is now cared for at
Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books in
Newcastle, UK. There is now growing awareness of the importance
of looking after original artwork and preparatory studies for
published illustration. This is all the more important at a time when
a great deal of published illustration is produced wholly or partially
through digital media, thereby leaving little or no trace of process.
Dunbar’s illustrations for A Gardener’s Diary, and the various
sketches and experimental drawings that went into their making,
give a clear sense of an artist bringing personal expertise in a
subject, allied to a lyrical, poetic painter’s eye, to a relatively
humble commercial non-fiction project. The crossover between her
work as painter and illustrator is seamless. Some of the motifs used
in the book illustrations were later worked up into paintings or
recycled in different forms in other projects. The more worked-up
illustration studies in ink retain the pencil underdrawing.
A preparatory drawing by Evelyn Dunbar for the title page of A Gardener’s Diary,
showing the pencil underdrawing (Country Life, 1938).
A selection of small drop-in line illustrations for A Farm Dictionary (Evans, 1953).
A sheet of studies for Evelyn Dunbar’s Brockley School mural.
Artwork for the title page of Gardeners’ Choice, showing pencil underdrawing and
notes to the printer.
Printed title page for A Gardener’s Diary.
 ‘I work like a sportsman, warming up before the
jump, drawing a lot, trying to enter and capture
the particular atmosphere, the gestures and
drama of the characters’

Pablo Auladell: La
Feria Abandonada

Working across comics and illustration, and ‘sometimes even

blurring the boundaries between those two languages’, the Spanish
artist Pablo Auladell has received several major awards for his
lyrical, dream-like illustration that is deeply rooted in classical,
expressive draughtsmanship. His prolific output reaches over
seventy books, working with a range of authors and texts,
contemporary and classic, as well as his own authorial projects. He
also finds time to teach at the Ars in Fabula School of Illustration in
Macerata, Italy. In 2016, his graphic novel version of Milton’s
Paradise Lost was published in English by Jonathan Cape.
La Feria Abandonada (The Abandoned Carnival), published by
Barbara Fiore in 2013, began life as a visual idea that ultimately
required Auladell to commission writers to provide complementary
words to this essentially visual concept. Ardizzone’s assertion that
the function of the illustrator is ‘to add to the work of the author’ is
here turned on its head, with the writers being commissioned to
‘explain something to the reader which the author cannot say in
pictures or has not the space to do so’. The outline concept had
been in Auladell’s mind and in his sketchbooks for some time, but he
decided to seek the help of two writer friends, journalist Rafa
Burgos and poet Julián López Medina, to, in his own words ‘enrich’
the project. Projects such as this, where the artist’s vision is the
driving force behind a book, are an increasingly significant part of
the illustration landscape.
Auladell’s artworks are ‘drawn’ directly on paper, and his
thoughts on the processes involved in the production of the book, his
range of visual and textual references and search for new directions
in visual language are expressed as lyrically and poetically as the
images themselves:
The first thing that comes to me is the name, the title of the
project, and then a vision, an image that appears more or less
clearly in my mind and becomes a sort of atmospheric, aesthetic
pattern. The name of the project, the name of the book is essential
for me when I begin a work that has not been commissioned. The
genetic code of the whole artwork is there as if it were an egg. It has
deep implications, the musicality of its sound, the rhythm, the tempo
– a series of evocations, a lighthouse which points the way to follow.
All this means that in the first stages, I draw very little and think a
lot.
I soon realized that the carnival I was interested in creating for
the illustrations must not be a ‘Tod Browning carnival’. It is not a
freak book. Its texts don’t tell stories of humiliation or social
exclusion, but sing of a world that is disappearing, the world that
people in my age group had known. These texts try to take a
photograph of the place where we were happy, where we lived
through something important, but a world now without us. So I
began to look for models with a poetic sense that was closer to that
of Solana, Picasso, Varela....
For La Feria Abandonada, I was at that time working hard on
changing my iconography and trying to incorporate a more
Mediterranean, archaic (in the sense of an image out of time, where
time has been suspended) graphic tradition that was ‘closer to me’.
So, you could say that this book is the first canon of that new way of
drawing, which I have been developing further since then, making
adjustments after every picturebook, failing and solving graphic
problems, a never-ending process because it consists of improving a
tool, sharpening a knife in order to make a deeper wound, tuning up
in order to sing better.

The first ‘vision’ drawing that Pablo Auladell made when setting out on the creative
journey of making La Feria Abandonada.
 Some of Auladell’s very early sketches for La feria.

All the prior work of preparing the final artwork is made in

sketchbooks, but the point is not to draw preparatory sketches for
specific images of the final book. If I draw in this way, the final picture
will become dead. I always draw ‘alla prima’ because, if not, I feel that I
prefer the first sketch to the final picture. I clearly feel that something
important, essential and mysterious has been lost in the process.
So I work like a sportsman, warming up before the jump, drawing a
lot, trying to enter and capture the particular atmosphere, the gestures
and drama of the characters. When I feel I am fully immersed in this
particular world, I try a first image, usually that one that I mentioned at
the beginning that appears in my mind as the first vision. If I fail, I try
again. But always working ‘alla prima’.
When I finally get that first image to the stage of being a finished
picture, all the subsequent work builds on this discipline, on drawing
that is so concentrated on the laws hidden in that picture. This is the
point that destroys that stupid belief about ‘artistic freedom’. Although I
am working on my own project and nobody has told me what to do or
how to draw, how to make the ‘proper’ picture you are drawing, it is now
the book I am building that is telling me what is required. So perhaps we
can say that drawing is a long process of learning to become capable of
listening to what your artwork is demanding and what it is refusing.

A final spread from La Feria Abandonada (texts by Rafa Burgos and Julián López
Medina, Barbara Fiore, 2013).
 Character development
‘It is often only when two or more characters are drawn
interacting with each other that they really begin to
assert their respective identities’

For illustrators working in the field of children’s books, especially

picturebook-making, the creation of convincing and consistent characters is
particularly important. To create characters that are absolutely believable
normally demands a great deal of time spent in the sketchbook or on endless
sheets of paper. Sometimes the artist may have a very clear idea in mind as to
the key personality traits of the character(s), while sometimes the characters
may only really assert themselves (and perhaps surprise their creator) on
paper, as the drawing grows in confidence.
Whichever way around the process works, it is often only when two or
more characters are drawn interacting with each other that they really begin
to assert their respective identities and eventually start to dictate the
development of a narrative. This is a process that I liken to the gradual
maturation of a TV drama series or situation comedy. Many writers for
television series have spoken of how early episodes come to be looked back
on as somewhat stilted and forced, as the actors try to make sense of their
roles. After a period of time, they begin to better know their characters’
identities and start to ‘add on’ various mannerisms and idiosyncrasies to
their roles. The writers in turn find themselves ‘writing for the characters’ as
the actors increasingly contribute to establishing their identities.
Consequently, the nature of the ‘situations’ that are written into the situation
comedy are increasingly led by the dramatic possibilities that interactions
between the contrasting personalities present.
Early character studies by Axel Scheffler for the almost universally popular Gruffalo, a character
invented by the English writer Julia Donaldson in the mid-1990s.
 ‘Many liberties needed to be taken with relative
scale, and occasionally limbs and joints’

Fifi Kuo and Ellie

Snowdon: Approaches
to animal character

Two illustrator–authors whose approaches to character design and

development are rooted respectively in their own particular
approaches to drawing are Fifi Kuo and Ellie Snowdon. Although
each has a solid grounding in observational drawing, Kuo can be
seen as an example of an artist whose characters emerge ‘from
within’, driven in the first instance by her emotions and motivations.
Snowdon comes from a background of keen interest in natural
history and consequent experience of drawing animals directly from
observation. Both of them developed the characters shown here
while studying as students.
Fifi Kuo is an illustrator from Taiwan whose picturebooks are
becoming increasingly familiar in the English-speaking world as well
as in numerous other languages and territories. Her success is
rooted in the utterly convincing characters that emerge from her
sketchbooks. It is within these pages that their personalities are
‘written’ in pictures, through a process of drawing and more
drawing.
The characters Panda and Penguin first appeared in a very
quickly sketched two-frame sequence in Kuo’s student sketchbook.
Panda sits working at a laptop, Penguin brings a hot drink. Although
this would not seem to be the most enticing starting point for
possible full-length picturebooks, there is a whole world of empathy
in these two frames, a deep bond between the two of them that is
subtly, visually evident. The two characters are then taken on
various outings within the pages of the sketchbook to explore how
they interact. It is never evident what gender they are, whether
they are children or adults, or even the nature of their relationship.
But they are utterly convincing as they go about their business. We
are hooked. We care what happens to them because their creator
clearly does. They embody friendship, warmth and empathy.
By contrast, Ellie Snowdon’s personal project to illustrate The
Owl and the Pussycat in picturebook form gives us a glimpse of the
extent and depth of formal research that can often be necessary
when developing convincing animal characters from scratch and
putting them through complex anthropomorphized movements.
While Kuo’s approach could be said to be partly intuitive,
Snowdon’s approach is systematic and methodical. Her longstanding
interest in natural history helps her to draw animals and birds
convincingly, but taking naturalistic observation and developing it
into imaginative character drawing requires a series of careful
adjustments through extensive experimental drawing. Adapting the
anatomy of animals and birds to those of humans demands
considerable levels of understanding of both. The challenges
involved in drawing an owl and a pussycat dancing closely together
are considerable. Snowdon first studied videos of human dancers,
making numerous drawings to closely examine their movements and
the ways in which they interact. The next stage involved a process
of testing through drawing the extent to which the vastly different
anatomies could be reconfigured, to allow for the suggestion of
convincingly syncopated movements and gestures from these alien
creatures. Many liberties needed to be taken with relative scale,
and occasionally limbs and joints, yet the characters somehow
remain essentially true to their zoological origins.
 Fifi Kuo’s picturebook The Perfect Sofa (Boxer Books, 2019) features the
characters Panda and Penguin situated in a domestic, human environment, trying to
decide on a new sofa.
 Pages from Kuo’s sketchbook showing the development of an idea for the first
Panda and Penguin story, including visual notes on narrative moments, sequence
and pace, and colour schemes.
Fifi Kuo’s two characters, Panda and Penguin, are very naturally integrated into the
landscapes that they find themselves in. Even when dwarfed by their surroundings,
the deep bond between them is evident.
Examples of some of the many stages involved in Snowdon’s quest to achieve
convincing representation of the anthropomorphic Owl and Pussycat.
 ‘I’m not, as I always say, a very “skilful”
draughtsman or someone who can “draw
correctly”, but somehow it works’

Axel Scheffler: The

evolution of a personal
visual vocabulary

There are not many illustrators who can lay claim to the term
‘household name’, but the creator of the visual representation of
Julia Donaldson’s ubiquitous Gruffalo is certainly one. Although he
has illustrated somewhere in the region of 150 books, and worked
variously on concepts of his own, group projects that he has
organized for a range of causes and his ‘artists’ books’, published in
Germany, it is for his part in the global phenomenon of The Gruffalo
that Axel Scheffler is inevitably best known.
After discovering that he didn’t want to continue studying Art
History in Hamburg, Axel Scheffler first came to the UK in the
early 1980s to study Illustration at Bath Academy of Art (now part
of Bath Spa University), where he was encouraged to draw from
observation:
I think I had done a little bit of observational drawing, but really
I think that only happened properly when I went to art school and
people told me that that was what I had to do. You know – ‘keep a
sketchbook and draw from life’, that sort of thing.
The course at Bath had a relationship with the historic School of
Art at Cooper Union in New York City, and Scheffler was able to
spend three months drawing there on an exchange. It seems clear
that the stylistic robustness of his chunky characters had its
foundations there, in the heavy, muscular pencil work of his
drawings. But he finds it difficult to see:
In my case I find it quite hard to make a connection between
what I did as a student and observational drawings and my work. I
think it’s an entirely different way of drawing, I am basically
making things up. I don’t think any of my sketching and
observational drawing fed into my professional work…unless
subconsciously, that’s always a possibility. When I’m illustrating a
story by Julia Donaldson I often think perhaps I should look at trees
and things. Of course, the more you do the more you get better, or
more confident but I can’t see myself building up a skill to make
picturebooks by sketching or observational drawings. They were
separate areas of drawing for me.
I longed to learn something or to be taught something, really,
but I didn’t get that. I am all for the academic drawing and life
drawing and all that. I think that’s a good thing for anyone. But I
can’t really see how it fed into my picturebook work. It’s just sort of
‘made up’ images really. I’m not, as I always say, a very ‘skilful’
draughtsman or someone who can ‘draw correctly’ but somehow it
works. Well, it works within the world of picturebooks, which have
their own logic…so it doesn’t really matter whether hands look like
hands or cows look like cows. Although I don’t think I learned
much at art college, the experience of drawing for three years and
trying things out I think was important. So I wouldn’t say I didn’t
need to go to art college, but I feel very much that my ‘technique’ or
my way of doing picturebooks – that was self-taught.
But everyone is different, and everyone finds their own way. It’s
hard to unravel or deconstruct how that is arrived at or what makes
a ‘style’. There is a connection from my student days, of course,
because I did a lot of editorial work – in a kind of cartoony style
with big pointy noses. I think for the picturebooks, when I first
drew, for example, A Squash and a Squeeze with Julia Donaldson, I
drew the little old lady with a very pointy nose and sagging breasts,
but the publishers pushed me in another direction – they wanted her
to be round and cute. And so I compromised. I’m sure my
picturebook style could have taken a completely different direction
if I had had more artistic freedom…making compromises with the
commercial world, that’s what started it and I just carried on in that
direction. I wasn’t allowed to draw people for a long time because
of the noses, but eventually I reached a stage where Macmillan, my
publisher, said ‘you’re allowed to do noses’. I find it hard to analyse
but I clearly made compromises towards the expectations of the
publishers – or the market, who knows, from early on, and it was a
direction that I took, perhaps neglecting some aspects of what I had
in ‘freer’ work.

A rough colour page layout by Axel Scheffler for the global publishing phenomenon
The Gruffalo (text by Julia Donaldson, MacMillan Children’s Books, 1999).
 Early incarnations of the Gruffalo were seen by the publishing team as a little too
malevolent-looking for the reader age.

With The Gruffalo, again, the publishers pushed me in a certain

direction. I started sketching the Gruffalo looking more scary than he
did in the end. The publishers said, ‘Let’s have him less scary and more
lovable’. They were probably right. I meet some people now who say that
their child can’t sleep when The Gruffalo book is in the room. Although
children like to be scared, I think it can be too much. When people ask
me what’s the secret behind the success of The Gruffalo I often think it’s
to do with the ambiguity between him being threatening, not ‘evil’ but
hungry, and on the other hand being quite stupid. And some children
find him even quite cuddly or sweet. So that’s part of the appeal of the
book. If he was just scary then I think the book wouldn’t have been such
a success.
An early sheet of character studies for The Gruffalo.
 Atmosphere and fantasy
‘The richly illustrated “gift book” fantasies by the likes
of Rackham and Dulac during the late Victorian period
have exerted a lasting influence on imaginative book
illustration’

The last decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the
twentieth were a Golden Age for illustration. New possibilities in full-
colour printing emerged, precipitating an explosion of sumptuous and
imaginative watercolour illustration by the likes of Arthur Rackham, Kay
Nielsen and Edmund Dulac in Europe, while in America the growth in
popular magazines saw many respected figurative artists, including John
Sloan and William Glackens, become regular and greatly admired
contributors to popular publications. The richly illustrated ‘gift book’
fantasies by the likes of Rackham and Dulac during the late Victorian period
have exerted a lasting influence on imaginative book illustration.
The world of fairies and wonderlands continues to engage and enthrall,
and is kept alive today through the combined vision and watercolour
craftsmanship of artists such as Alan Lee and P. J. Lynch. It is perhaps true to
say that the convincing visualization of fantastic worlds and mystical,
mythical creatures can be at its most effective when represented in an
essentially realist, idiomatic manner. Making the unreal real, if you will,
demands great technical skill as well as vision.
‘At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her.’ During what has come to
be known as the Golden Age of illustration, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
came into the public domain and precipitated the publication of many new illustrated editions. Arthur
Rackham’s 1907 version for William Heinemann is perhaps the best remembered.
 ‘I’m very bad at keeping sketchbooks, but I do try
to keep a record of experiences from everyday
life, fragments of memory, characters, thoughts,
feelings, quotes or anything that moves me’

Victoria Turnbull:
Authorial flights of
fancy

Victoria Turnbull’s illustration work is notable for its exceptional

level of craftsmanship and painstaking rendering. Her picturebooks
can be compared to operatic productions, each page like a carefully
designed stage set, every inch filled with voluptuous detail. Her
authorship of these books is almost entirely visual, with minimum
levels of supporting text. Her work reveals an intuitive approach
that is not based on formal observational drawing, but is
nevertheless rooted in the observation of people and nature.

Observation
Drawing is a way for me to communicate with my unconscious, to
generate ideas and to give physical form to the things in my head.
My drawing has always been a bridge to the imagination. Like a
great many children, my love for drawing began when I was very
young. If I wasn’t drawing from my imagination, I would be
meticulously copying pictures I found in books or on television (I
would record on a VCR and pause the video to draw fuzzy stills of
cartoon characters). This compulsive childhood drawing is the
foundation of my illustration work today.
I did not, and still do not particularly enjoy drawing from life
(much of my observational drawing experience has been in an
educational setting). That isn’t to say I don’t recognize the
importance of observation to drawing. I think an interest in and a
curiosity about the world is essential for an illustrator. When I do
draw from life, my gaze tends to be pulled by the human subject or
to the natural world and not by inanimate manmade objects. I’m
very bad at keeping sketchbooks, but I do try to keep a record of
experiences from everyday life, fragments of memory, characters,
thoughts, feelings, quotes or anything that moves me. I enjoy the
merging of fact and fiction on the page. I find connections emerge
between these random notes and doodles and stories begin to form.
Much of my drawing is based on intuition. I try to draw from
inside myself. I will draw something over and over until it looks
right and feels true to my experience. By referencing the world we
share, I hope my imaginary drawings seem more real and come
alive for the reader. The characters in my stories take shape through
the process of drawing. They develop into personalities I feel I
know. The illustrators I most admire are those that draw with
empathy and are able to externalize the inner emotions of a
character. This is always my ambition when it comes to my own
work. I wish to establish an emotional connection with the reader
that will, in some small way, colour their experience of the world.

Process and technique

My initial drawings are drawn on tracing paper in pencil. I enjoy
the smooth texture of tracing paper and the ability to layer one
image over another (it also avoids the very real prospect of ruining
expensive paper with terrible drawings). I scan my pencil drawings
and scale them, to preserve the integrity of the line, before printing
them out onto high quality paper. I then colour the printed pencil
images with a mixture of pastel and coloured pencil, sometimes
blending areas with linseed oil or highlighting with gouache. After
scanning the coloured artwork, I’ll use Photoshop to make any
corrections and to add a little ‘oomph’ to the colour.

Victoria Turnbull’s technique of working in pencil on tracing paper before printing

and adding colour was developed through trial and error when working on what
would become her debut picturebook, The Sea Tiger (Templar, 2014), while studying
for her MA degree.
Controlling tone and colour
My first book was developed in the final stages of my MA course. I drew
the initial sketches for The Sea Tiger in pencil without considering how
I would add the colour, because at that time I didn’t have a particular
process, I just wanted to get the drawings right. As a result I shaded in
large areas of the drawings so they worked in black and white, but there
was simply too much tone for them to work successfully as colour
illustrations. I had to carefully remove large areas of pencil and redraw
sections so I could use them for the final artwork.
I feel comfortable using a pencil but colour is something I’ve had to
work very hard at. Finding a good balance between drawing and colour
is often trial and error, as it can be difficult to recognize mid-process.
With experience this has got easier but sometimes I’m so intent on
making a beautiful drawing that I get carried away and add too much
pencil. I draw on tracing paper, and I have learned to add large areas of
tone to the reverse so that it’s easier to remove and make adjustments
where necessary.
Pencil sketch and finished artwork for Pandora (Frances Lincoln, 2016).
A very simple compositional sketch shown above an intricately crafted final spread
from Cloud Forest (Lincoln Children’s Books, 2019).
 ‘The preservation of a sketchbook such as this
gives us a particularly acute insight into the depth
and breadth of research…that underpins the
development of what is often casually referred to
as an artist’s “style”’

Sheila Robinson: The

Twelve Dancing
Princesses

Born in Nottingham, UK, Sheila Robinson was one of a group of

mid-twentieth century artist–illustrators who settled in the English
village of Great Bardfield, and subsequently became known as the
Great Bardfield Group. Like Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious,
who were seen as the leading lights of this group, she worked
comfortably across the fine and applied arts throughout the 1950s
and 1960s, taking on such varied commissions as designing an ark of
animals for a seaside fairground ride, assisting Bawden in the
production of a mural for the 1951 Festival of Britain and creating a
series of card-print illustrations for a deluxe edition of D. H.
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers for the Limited Editions Club of New
York. Her illustrative work was published widely in books and
magazines of the period.
An early self-initiated project to design and illustrate one of the
traditional German tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, The
Twelve Dancing Princesses, was developed into a completely hand-
rendered dummy book that now resides at the Fry Art Gallery and
Museum in Essex, where a collection of the work of the Great
Bardfield Group is held. This exquisitely rendered dummy book is
the product of extensive visual research that we are able to study
thanks to the accompanying research sketchbook.
The preservation of a sketchbook such as this gives us a
particularly acute insight into the depth and breadth of research or
‘drawing for illustration’ that underpins the development of what is
often casually referred to as an artist’s ‘style’. Robinson’s
exploratory work includes costume reference studies, drawn from
observation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, general
background drawing and experimentation with various media and
detailed rough page designs for the final artworks, vigorously
sketched in black and white with accompanying handwritten text.
The hand-stitched dummy book was created to the format of the
Puffin Picture Books series, conceived by Noel Carrington and
Allen Lane at Penguin in the 1940s, which became a hugely
successful series through into the early 1970s. The landscape-
format books alternated full-colour and black and white spreads and
could be printed on one very large sheet of paper, colour on one
side, black and white on the other. The single sheet was then folded
and cut into a thirty-two-page book, making it very cheap to
produce. A facsimile version of this book was published in 2012 at
Anglia Ruskin University.
Robinson’s daughter, Chloë Cheese, herself a leading illustrator
and printmaker, tells us all she can about her late mother’s
unpublished project:
The story behind The Twelve Dancing Princesses seems to be
that my mother drew it during her time at Nottingham (as there is a
reference to it in a letter from a friend, asking if she had had any
luck with it, implying that it had been seen in Nottingham, although
the letter is addressed to Sheila at the Royal College of Art). But she
had no luck with publication as that particular series had been
stopped. Being preoccupied with other things, my mother never tried
again. Much later, the writer Olive Cook was also very taken with it,
but she had no luck either. The ability to make digital changes to
spelling mistakes was really helpful to its final publication through
the university. My mother did not persevere after rejection with any
of her work, as she was too proud and always took the rejections
quite deeply to heart. The publication at Anglia Ruskin University
with Brian Webb’s design was lovely though, and I do feel sorry that
my mother did not have the heart-warming experience of a later
appreciation of all her work.
I loved being read the story from Sheila’s original when I was
little, and definitely appreciated it myself.
Sheila Robinson’s research for The Twelve Dancing Princesses took her to the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London to sketch period costumes.
Sheila Robinson’s 1950s research sketchbook for her self-initiated project to create
a picturebook version of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The unselfconscious
functionality of these intense studies makes them exquisitely compelling in
themselves.

A finished spread from The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

 Authorial graphic storytelling
‘Many illustrators now see it as the ultimate creative
field to aspire to’

The role and identity of the illustrator continues to evolve, broaden and,
increasingly, embrace authorship. Comics and graphic novels are gradually
being accorded greater respect as an important branch of literature. Reviews
in mainstream literary publications display a growing acceptance and
understanding of this fusion of art, design and literature, and there is a
noticeable growth in the confidence of reviewers to find a vocabulary with
which to appraise their subjects. Children’s picturebook-makers, too, have
seen an explosion of interest in their authorship. In marked contrast to the
situation twenty or thirty years ago, when this area of work received little
serious attention in art schools, many illustrators now see it as the ultimate
creative field to which to aspire.
In both picturebook-making and graphic storytelling, the author is
responsible for all aspects of this multimodal medium in a way that is
perhaps comparable to the singer-songwriter who composes a song, sings it
and plays all of the instruments in their own recording studio. There are
obvious ways in which draughtsmanship forms a basis for this process, just
as musicianship does in the above analogy. But it also plays a key role in
research and information-gathering, page layout and character design.
One of the most influential artists in the development of authorial graphic narrative was Winsor McCay.
His Little Nemo in Slumberland ran from October 1905 to July 1911 in the New York Herald, and to
1927 in other publications. In this September 1907 strip, Little Nemo and Little Imp become giants and
explore the city.
 ‘Drawing from observation has been hugely
important to my work…drawing on location was
integral to my process’

Isabel Greenberg:
Glass Town

Isabel Greenberg has emerged in recent years as one of the most

original, intelligent and imaginative graphic authors working in the
genre. Glass Town was published by Jonathan Cape to great acclaim
in early 2020. The book takes the Brontë siblings’ early immersion
in their fantasy worlds of Angria, Gondal and Glass Town, and, as
James Smart put it in his 2020 review in the Guardian newspaper,
‘blurs fiction and memoir: characters walk between worlds and woo
their creators’. It is perhaps unsurprising that Greenberg found it
difficult to choose between art school and a more traditionally
‘academic’ education that would accommodate her passion for
literature and history. All of these interests are evident in Glass
Town. As a child, her family were happy to encourage her to draw:
My parents worked together running a company that designed
exhibitions, so they were very supportive of me pursuing a creative
path. It would probably have been very surprising to them if I had
become a doctor or something – which I hasten to say was never an
option in terms of the necessary skills!
In terms of going on to higher education, at seventeen every
decision, even choosing a sandwich, seemed huge and potentially
life-changing to me. I loved English and History at school just as
much as I loved Art, so university versus art school was a decision I
went back and forth on a lot. Looking back, I know there are a lot of
things I missed that I would have hugely enjoyed in a more
academic education, but in terms of the life path my choice set me
on, I have no regrets at all.
Drawing from observation has been hugely important to my
work. My book projects tend to be quite long-form and research-
heavy anyway, but for Glass Town, drawing on location was integral
to my process. While you can see a flat rendering of a place from a
photo, the atmosphere and the smell and the sounds (and the
discomfort of drawing leaning up against a wall while it is
drizzling!) are not comparable. Place is often very important to a
story, and if you can get a feel for it on the ground, you always
should. Even if it’s not possible to visit a specific location, there is
usually a way to find some immersive research opportunities. If I
am between projects and feeling stuck, I will usually take a
sketchbook to a gallery or museum and just have a wander around.
That said, I have never been someone who has been good at sitting
in a café or on a train drawing people.
I think the more you draw the better you get, and I have found
that after each book I have done my hand has got more confident
and my drawings better. I hope this trajectory continues. I’ve
changed my material preferences, experimented with different
mediums and ways of working, but ultimately drawing is the most
important thing, and if I haven’t drawn enough I can see it in my
output. I do keep a sketchbook, but it is not necessarily just for
drawings. I use it for writing, thumbnailing and ideas. I tend to
mostly draw for a specific purpose, project or idea. I enjoy doing life
drawing and sketching in museums, which is one of the few times I
draw with no objective.
I think my ‘way of drawing’ has perhaps emerged specifically to
serve graphic storytelling. With these long-form books, in order to
be able to tell a story over 200 pages, I have definitely developed a
style that enables me to work fast and consistently.
 Why did I undertake an MA in Animation? Honestly, I was
having a bit of a career crisis! Being an illustrator, for me anyway,
is a juggling act. I have the projects I love – graphic novels – and
the projects I enjoy but maybe aren’t my passion, and then things
purely for making money and surviving. I did the MA as a moment
to pause and learn new skills and work out where I wanted to go
next. But I am also a university lecturer, and pragmatically I knew
that having an MA makes working in this world easier. After I
finished I realized that I wasn’t an animator, but an illustrator who
liked making my drawings move. This was a useful realization, and
the skills I took away from the MA have been invaluable. Not least, I
discovered how much I loved to work in charcoal.
Charcoal and soft pencils (palomino blackwings) are my current
materials of choice. But I also still love to work in brush and ink
and reed pen. I definitely favour line-based working. I’ve tried to
work with shape but it’s not the way my brain works. I like
materials that allow for unexpected line variations. I hate fineliners
and anything that has a predictable and static line. I like materials
that leave traces; splashes, dusting, smudges and textures. I add my
colour after, always digitally. I like the colour to be flat and matt
and to let the texture and detail of the hand-drawn line work take
the lead. Colour is something I have struggled with, and I am still
learning and improving.
Sketchbook developmental work for Isabel Greenberg’s Glass Town (Jonathan
Cape, 2020).
Interior pages from Glass Town.
 ‘Using different print processes forces you to keep
re-learning how to draw and constantly shifts you
out of your comfort zone‘

Jon McNaught: Quiet

visual drama

Alongside his acclaimed cover designs for The London Review of

Books and regular work in editorial illustration for publications
including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The
New Yorker, London-based Jon McNaught is perhaps best known
for his distinctive and distinguished authorship of highly atmospheric
graphic novels such as Birchfield Close (2010), Dockwood (2012)
and Kingdom (2018) with the publisher Nobrow. In all of these
books, McNaught imbues everyday lives with a profound sense of
the unsaid. His artworks are predominantly ‘shape-led’ rather than
linear, perhaps influenced by his work as a printmaker. Drawing
therefore informs and supports his work in less direct but
nonetheless equally important ways, as he explains:
Drawing was always my favourite pastime as a kid. I probably
spent most evenings carefully copying characters from books in
coloured pencils or felt-tipped pens or whatever I could get my
hands on. It was the one thing that I could concentrate on and get
lost in. It didn’t matter whether I was copying Asterix panels,
illustrations from Erik the Viking, or drawing the cast of Sonic the
Hedgehog, it would make me feel calm and would make hours fly
by. I have very fond memories of late nights under a lamp in my
bedroom, trying to learn the magic trick of making a scene come to
life on a page. It seems harder now to get lost in the moment of
drawing like that, but I think that is what I am still aiming for.
I had some great art teachers over the years who encouraged my
drawing, and at university I learnt a lot from the print technicians
(who later became my colleagues). The print rooms are a beautiful
place to learn, through curiosity and experimentation. Using
different print processes forces you to keep re-learning how to draw
and constantly shifts you out of your comfort zone.
I don’t draw from direct observation as much as I should. I go
through phases, and am always more contented and inspired when I
am filling up a sketchbook, but I can’t say that I am good at keeping
it up all the time. When working on a project, I often take research
trips to sketch and take notes, (with Kingdom, for example, I went to
museums, campsites and motorway service stations). This is
essential to the work, as I need to inhabit the locations to notice the
details that bring the drawings to life. As much as I like drawing
from life, often for practicality I take photographs and then sketch
at home using the photographs as reference. This way I can zoom
into photographs and continue to explore the locations, finding
corners that I missed. Some of my favourite images come from
snapshots taken from the windows of trains, where you are drifting
along past odd scraps of land and the backs of houses. Sometimes
even a few sentences scribbled into a notebook can be enough; that
way I can describe a scene to myself and reconstruct it later on the
page.
These days when I do draw from life, I try to work at getting the
essence of something, rather than an accurate detailed
representation. If I look too closely and add all the details I can be
lost for an hour drawing the branches of a tree, but still not quite
capture it. What I’m interested in now is a sort of ‘observational
cartooning’ – capturing a sense of something in as few marks as
possible.
Creating atmosphere and light through shape – I always start
with a pencil sketch to create the compositions, and then I work out
colours and tones from there. Sometimes I do this by making a
small ink thumbnail, or sometimes I make a digital mock-up in
Photoshop, but I always spend a lot more time planning the image
than actually painting the final piece. When I get to the final
artwork, I know exactly what will go where, so I can concentrate on
the quality of the individual brush marks. I try to be fairly loose,
using the shape of the brush to make shapes, rather than labouring
too much over each detail. I am always aiming to be looser and
more energetic with my art, but I think I am unfortunately more
inclined towards neatness. Lately I’ve been drawing in my
sketchbook with watercolour and ink, without sketching out the
lines first. I’m finding this quite liberating, although I have a long
way to go before I can get very good results.
In this early page from Kingdom, Jon McNaught sets the scene, the intricately
rendered banality of a motorway service station. The family whose trip is at the
centre of the book’s journey are silently observed from above.
 McNaught makes very rough initial pencil drawings as he begins to map out the
page-by-page ‘scenography’ of his visual storytelling.

Working in the way that I do with shape has taken years of gradual
progression. Working as an illustrator has helped push me to attempt to
capture more and more varied subjects with my drawings. As a student I
worked almost exclusively with black and blue and made very simple
scenes, never drawing people or too much detail. Over the years I have
gradually learned how to add more colour to my process, as well as more
detail. I always avoided drawing people, in particular faces, until it
became a necessity for the comics that I wanted to draw. I still have lots
of subjects and scenes that I haven’t figured out how to capture, so it is
an ongoing exploration.
For me, drawing is mainly about the act of paying attention, paying
tribute to a subject by spending time with it and carefully recording it on
the page. Craft is also important to me, and although I think any
medium of drawing is legitimate, a sensitivity to the process and
materials is a big part of drawing.
 Advertising and display
‘While advertising design today may appear to be a
world of all-singing, all-dancing multimedia, there is
still considerable demand for drawing-based
illustration’

Until the last decades of the nineteenth century, advertising art had mainly
appeared in the form of black and white engraved artworks that were
predominantly published as straightforward representations of artefacts or
products for sale. The opening up of photographic colour separation in early
twentieth-century printing led to rapid recognition of the potential for the
artist’s image in advertising. In Britain, William Nicholson and his brother-
in-law James Pryde had led the way in poster design for advertising under
their collective partnership, Beggarstaffs. Company directors began to set up
art departments, and the urban landscape was soon transformed by hoardings
plastered with large-scale posters scrambling for attention. Magazines, too,
were awash with vibrant advertising illustration, as leading artists seized the
opportunities that this new era offered. The distinctive work of masters of
advertising art such as J. C. Leyendecker in the US, Jules Chéret and
Cassandre (Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron) in France and Frank Newbould in
Britain reached huge audiences.
The role of the art director, even before the term became commonplace,
was becoming increasingly important. Two of the most influential, visionary
figures in British advertising from the 1930s were Frank Pick, chief
executive of London Passenger Transport Board, and Jack Beddington,
publicity director at Shell. They were responsible for raising standards by
persuading some of the finest artists of the day, including Paul Nash, Graham
Sutherland and Ben Nicholson, to contribute to their publicity campaigns, as
well as those who were more familiar with straddling the fine and applied
arts, such as Edward Bawden and Barnett Freedman.
 While advertising design today may appear to be a world of all-singing,
all-dancing multimedia, there is still considerable demand for drawing-
based illustration.

An 1891 poster for Cosmydor soap by the great French poster artist Jules Chéret, who was highly
regarded for his innovative exploitation of the lithographic process.
‘Drawing is fundamental to the way I view the
world’
 Kerry Lemon:
Sketchbook to hoarding

The challenges involved in drawing for illustration destined to be

experienced at huge scale are, unsurprisingly, markedly different
from those faced when creating imagery destined for the intimacy
of the printed page. Kerry Lemon has forged a career as a go-to
artist for creating projects on large-scale hoardings, prestigious
storefronts, light projections in public spaces and much more. Here,
she discusses her methods and her passion for drawing.
Drawing is fundamental to the way I view the world. It is my
obsession: endlessly fascinating, DEEPLY frustrating, always
surprising and, at its best moments, completely fulfilling and
meditative. I have always adored the power of drawing; the fact that
I can conjure entire worlds to my precise design (both real and
imagined) just using a surface and marks. I began with editorial
illustration and quickly moved to installation work – large-scale
temporary works for luxury brands. Today I no longer ‘illustrate’ as
such, but create large-scale works for the public realm in diverse
materials. Drawing remains central to my practice. Everything I
make is initially drawn by hand, sketched and then refined again
and again, until I create the final artwork ready to be fabricated in
wood, glass, metal or stone. Throughout the design process,
drawing is also how I communicate with my fabricators – scribbled
ideas in meetings, exploring how we can build and assemble the
final pieces. I cannot imagine my life without drawing. I love how
my line has improved and developed over the years – a clear result of
hours spent immersed in the process rewarded by better drawings. It
is my very favourite thing to do. A lifelong companion with which to
explore and document my desires and adventures.
Working at scale has required a new set of skills. These pieces
will be viewed from a variety of angles, heights and distances and
also speed – walking, cycling, driving.... A slight wiggle in a line on
an A4 sheet of paper will be vast once recreated as part of a
hundred-metre artwork. Each project teaches me something new: a
new context, landscape, material. I relish the challenge of these
projects – the bigger the better. To create such monumental work
requires a team of experts. I design and draw everything by hand,
then pass these pieces to my artworker, Josh, who is a wizard at
converting them to the correct dimensions and file types for the
fabrication process. I collaborate with fabricators all over the world
– experts in their chosen materials who are able to utilize both
traditional and new technologies to create the final artworks.
I’m evangelistic about drawing. Always on a mission to get
people to draw. The tragedy of art education is the quick
determination of who is ‘good’ at drawing and who is not. An
obsession with product, rather than the process of creation. Finding
joy in the process, the sound and texture of dragging pen, brush or
pencil across a page will mean you will continue to do it and, as in
all things, the more you actually draw, the more you WILL
automatically improve – your finished drawings will become better
and better. There are no shortcuts. No expensive pens or expert
tuition will get you there. Just draw. Draw constantly. Draw
everything, all the time. Drawing is all about looking and a regular
drawing practice will alter your view of the world. You will begin to
see things that you previously ignored. Sitting on the train, you will
be acutely aware of the pattern of the seat, the light on the metal
railing, the profile of the commuter opposite, the weave of their
scarf. Drawing is magic, and I am bewitched by it.
Kerry Lemon at work on the windows of Harvey Nichols department store in
London.

A view of one of the final window designs.

An early draft plan on paper for the window by Kerry Lemon.

A section of the design showing scaling-up measurements.

An original ink drawing on paper of a section of the window, shown above the
digitally cleaned-up version.
 ‘I proceed to make from memory several very
rough diagrams in pencil of compositions
suggested by the different aspects of the town
which I have seen in my rambles’

Frank Newbould:
Eliminating detail

During the interwar years, Frank Newbould’s distinctive posters

were ubiquitous in British cities. For much of his career, the poster
was the primary means of reaching a large audience. Often printed
in multiple sheets and pasted up in numbered order to make the full
image, they were designed to be seen from a distance with
maximum visual impact.
Newbould’s particular skill was in simplifying complex scenes
into flat shapes and colours and organizing them into dynamic,
instantly readable compositions. He detailed his working methods in
Lesson 23, Poster Drawing, one of twenty-five instructional
booklets published by The British and Dominions School of Drawing
series in the 1920s. Taking as a case study his 1922 poster for the
Royal Hotel, Ventnor, he gives an insight into the relationship
between observational information-gathering and the process of
balancing reality with compositional design needs:
A plan that I often adopt myself, especially when handling
landscape posters, is to eliminate as much as possible, especially in
the foreground, and to allow myself to elaborate a little more at the
point in the composition to which I am attempting to lead the eye.
As an example, take my poster of Ventnor. In this, everything else
has been reduced to its simplest form so that the utmost value might
be got out of the little town nestling against the distant headlands.
In this case the eye makes a following movement and the only
feature which really arrests it is the panel of lettering which tells
the story and is of course the only reason for the existence of the
poster.
Returning to this Ventnor example, I make it a working rule in
the case of a commission like this to wander about the place in
question for an hour or two and try to get hold of the atmosphere of
the place. At the end of that time I shall have decided what the
character of the resort is; it may be a place of fashion or it may be
of the quaint, old-world type. Also, I shall have noticed that there
are two or three points of vantage in or about the town from which
a good composition could possibly be made. I then visit these
various points, making no sketches, and return to the town, where I
proceed to make from memory several very rough diagrams in
pencil of compositions suggested by the different aspects of the town
which I have seen in my rambles. Very rough scrawls are these, say
about two inches by three inches. The most promising of them I
then try to elaborate on a slightly larger scale as far as possible
from memory. The reason why I do not do this part of the work on
the spot is that when the landscape is not actually before my eyes my
sense of composition has freer play; and as I fill in the various
landmarks from memory the tendency is for them to appear in the
place that I think best from the point of view of composition, which
may be a little at variance with the actual positions.
However it is much more important, at any rate from the poster
artist’s point of view, that the composition should be perfectly right
than that it should be exactly topographically accurate. The various
features in the landscape should be regarded as isolated notes of
music which it is the task of the poster artist to arrange into one
striking and harmonious chord. One cannot of course take too many
liberties with a place or it ceases to be that place. The atmosphere is
the great thing to try to catch.
 The next step is to take my memory sketch back to the spot from
which I obtained the impression on which it was based, and
compare it with the actual scene. Probably I find that I have placed,
say, the pier in an impossible position and it must be altered more in
accordance with the facts. And so I go on, in the end effecting a
compromise between what I think ought to be and what is. I then
take written notes of the most important colour features, but I
rarely make any outside colour sketches, preferring to rely on my
memory and written notes. I have done a very considerable amount
of outdoor colour work in the past, and it is probably on that
account that I do not now find it necessary. Nevertheless, I cannot
too strongly urge the beginner to go direct to Nature in the first
place, otherwise there is bound to be a subconscious tendency to
borrow colour schemes and compositions from the work of other
men.
 Frank Newbould’s method of researching his travel posters involved getting to
know his subject by making a thorough tour of the site and then making very quick
sketches of the key features, as in these drawings of Ventnor, Isle of Wight.
The final poster for the Royal Hotel, Ventnor, rendered in Newbould’s signature
simplified flat colour.
 Humour
‘Graphic satire and caricature have long been seen as
among the most effective ways of puncturing
pomposity in all its forms’

Visual humour has probably been with us since humankind first made
representational marks on a surface. There are certainly plenty of examples
to be found in surviving artworks and decorated artefacts from the ancient
Greek and Roman civilizations. Poking fun at human failings and
eccentricities was much favoured in wood carvings and decorative
embellishments throughout the Middle Ages. Around 1500, Albrecht Dürer
and Leonardo da Vinci both indulged in what has since become known as
caricature – the distortion and exaggeration of an individual’s features for
comic effect – and the eighteenth century saw William Hogarth’s pictorial
satire and social comment powerfully influence the genre. Graphic satire and
caricature have long been seen as some of the most effective ways of
puncturing pomposity in all its forms, particularly in the political arena, and
the drawn image is highly valued for its role in describing and reflecting
upon the absurdity of everyday life. Humorous drawing can be found across
most areas of illustration, whether as an accompaniment to comedic writing
or in authorial visual work. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the ‘visual gag’ was generally delivered in the form of elaborate,
even epic scenes, often heavily populated and executed with great skill by
highly trained draughtsmen. While we may still admire the skills of such
artists, the humour often seems laborious to a modern audience, and the one-
off newspaper or magazine ‘cartoon’ is now generally associated with a
manner of drawing that is executed in a ‘light’ or non-realistic manner.
E. H. Shepard is best known for his illustrations for A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, but he was also
one of the most prolific humorous artists of his day, contributing to many periodicals including this 1935
edition of the legendary Punch magazine.
 ‘It’s mostly just through pen or pencil on paper,
seeing where it goes. If it makes me smile it might
be going somewhere’

Paul Slater: Master of

the absurd

Paul Slater stands out in the world of contemporary illustration and

painting for his anachronistic fusion of formal, classical drawing and
painting skills with a highly personal sense of the absurd. His world
is populated by earnest military types, genial cowboys, cowgirls and
other comic-book heroes. For his illustration commissions, he has
tended to work primarily with acrylic paints. It is the incongruity of
such virtuoso formal skills being employed to realize a particularly
British sense of nonsense that makes Slater’s world so unique and
compelling. For many years his work has graced leading
international magazines and newspapers, illustrating journalistic
writing with surreal visual comedy. He now devotes his time
primarily to painting.
Perhaps surprisingly, Slater is firmly with Ardizzone when
analysing his relationship with drawing and the evolution of his
methods. He points to two particular moments of epiphany. The first
of these was the excellent life-drawing teaching he recalls receiving
as an Art Foundation student at Burnley art school in the 1970s,
although he feels that overall at art school, the greatest value came
from learning from fellow students. After going on to study
Illustration at Maidstone College of Art, it was during his
subsequent MA studies at the Royal College of Art that a second
key event was to influence the direction of his work:
At the RCA I did draw people from life in the sketchbook all the
time, but one day I was on a London bus, going around Hyde Park
or somewhere, people-watching from the top deck, and I saw this
particular guy, he was bent double with a huge backpack. And he
was wearing menacingly tight blue shorts, with a baseball cap over
long hair. Totally absurd. I went to draw him but it was too late,
he’d gone. When I got into college I drew him from memory. I
realized then that I could do this and that I could do it in a
consistent way.
It’s a process I suppose. I got quite good at taking a drawing
from my head and transferring it to paper through drawing. I’m
trying now to do that with oil paint. In a way it’s more drawing-
based. I think I was a bit sloppy before. I’m trying to get more
spontaneity onto the canvas, more movement and gestures, less
defined, softer.
Paradoxically, he feels that in order to allow for more
expression in the painting, the planning through drawing needs to be
more meticulous: ‘Everything flows from drawing. I like to plan
methodically.’ But the initial visual ideas are arrived at through a
much more intuitive kind of drawing in the sketchbook:
I just start drawing. It might be a cowboy or a king. I might get
two or three decent ideas. It’s mostly just through pen or pencil on
paper, seeing where it goes. If it makes me smile it might be going
somewhere. It’s not intellectual. I gave a talk at an art school
conference about ‘the absurd’ a while ago. I felt a bit like a sore
thumb. Everyone seemed to have carefully planned their absurdity. I
don’t work like that. I just think stupid things through drawing.
When a drawing asserts itself as a subject for a final painting, it
is squared up mechanically to be transferred to canvas. Of course,
this kind of drawing for illustration is much more controlled and
practical. Lynton Lamb devotes a chapter to this process in his book
Preparation for Painting (Penguin, 1960). Ensuring that the final
painting or illustration is marked up to exactly the same proportions
(by multiplying the width and then the length by the same
percentage, rather than adding the same measurement to each, as I
have seen happen so often!), a pencil grid is laid over the original
drawing, divided into equal squares. These can then be enlarged by
the same proportions onto the final surface for painting, allowing
the original drawing to follow the exact same composition by
checking square by square, just as was practised by Italian
Renaissance painters. In Slater’s case, the scaled-up sketch is
initially painted roughly with thin washes of colour, through which
the pencil work is still visible, ready for over-painting.
Examples of Paul Slater’s illustrations for The Times newspaper’s ‘Eating Out’
pages, showing the rough colour sketches with scaling-up grids.
 Reportage and graphic
commentary
‘Visual journalism is, and always has been, a means by
which the artist can comment subjectively – poetically,
satirically, subversively – on the chosen subject’

It is probably fair to say that this particular branch of illustration is the most
deeply rooted in observational drawing of them all. In his seminal book on
the subject, The Artist as Reporter, Paul Hogarth lamented what he believed
was the inferior status traditionally accorded to the documentary artist,
observing that ‘Journalism, like detective fiction, weighs lightly on the scales
of art criticism’.
Artists have engaged in ‘reporting’ visually on events since the earliest
recorded history. For much of this time, visual journalism was used as
propaganda to present versions of war, heroic deeds or pageantry in a
manner that suited the requirements of its sponsor. But it was often also the
only way that the general public could catch a glimpse, albeit a selective one,
of far-off worlds and events that we are now accustomed to being
bombarded with through our ubiquitous screens. The pages of newspapers
and magazines through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were
filled with engravings and later direct reproductions of drawings made by
artists whose works were often at least partially made from direct
observation on location. Hogarth himself was one of the most celebrated of
artist-reporters, travelling the world to observe and record through pencil
drawing.
Visual journalism is, and always has been, a means by which the artist
can comment subjectively – poetically, satirically, subversively – on the
chosen subject. With photography in courtrooms having been banned on and
off in many cultures, ‘artists’ impressions’ are still used for trial reporting. In
some places, including the United Kingdom, direct drawing at a trial is now
banned, so the sketches are produced of necessity from a mixture of
immediate memory and available photographic reference, with generally
mixed results. In 1961 Ronald Searle spent a year in Jerusalem making
drawings at the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for Life
magazine. While in Israel he also tracked down and visited survivors of the
Holocaust, including the man who led the escape through the sewers of
Warsaw and another who tried to negotiate the exchange of trucks for Jews in
concentration camps. Writing about it in the Association of Illustrators
Newsletter in January 1977, he recalled: ‘I drew them and many others…
until my portfolio was complete enough to give the trial the aspect of
horror that lay behind that cold recounting in the court.’
Laura Carlin is one of the most admired illustrators of the twenty-first century. Her professional work in
picturebooks and other areas of the arts is built on a strong background in reportage drawing. This detail
from one of her full-page images comes from her time spent observing daily life in Japan while studying
at the Royal College of Art in 2004, and was reproduced in her limited-edition book Ten Days in Tokyo
(RCA).
Ronald Searle documented his incarceration in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in hundreds of
drawings on scavenged scraps of paper. They span from the prisoners’ early months on a troop ship to
the unimaginable horrors that were to await them upon arrival in Singapore. A selection of the drawings
was published in the book Forty Drawings (Cambridge University Press, 1946) on Searle’s eventual
return to his hometown of Cambridge.

Searle was an experienced reportage artist, having travelled widely,

including to Poland and Yugoslavia with Paul Hogarth in 1947 to make
drawings that highlighted the plight of war refugees, and later across
America to make documentary drawings for both Life and Holiday
magazines. It was his harrowing drawings, made in unimaginable conditions
while imprisoned by the Japanese for most of the Second World War, that
gave him an involuntary initial grounding. Summing up his thoughts on
reportage illustration as a whole in the same article he wrote:
Physically the work is tough and mentally it is anguishing. It is
only possible to do reportage work if one has a solid grounding in
drawing. Reportage has to have flesh, bones, and above all, life in
it. One is not illustrating, but pushing one’s nose into life. On top
of that, one must have something to say – however crass. Reportage
is not reporting, it is opinion and comment that takes it away from
journalism into (minor) art.
 ‘My ideas evolve more freely through the physical
act of drawing’

David Hughes: Covid

diary

David Hughes’s work as an illustrator and graphic author over the

last forty years has been profoundly influential. As well as working
regularly for newspapers and magazines in the UK and US, he has
authored numerous graphic novels and picturebooks and created
designs for opera in Italy. His work is deeply rooted in the drawn
line as an uncompromising and primary means of expression. Here,
he writes about a project undertaken during the COVID-19
lockdowns in the UK, and about drawing in general, in a typically
freewheeling ‘stream of consciousness’ manner.
On waking this morning at about 4:45 a.m. – which is the usual
time these days, within thirty minutes or so with a cup of tea in bed
I reach for the sketchbook on the side table. Outside the rainfall is
biblical. It has been almost a daily routine like this since early
March, drawing in bed, sketching in secret, before the day realizes.
It helps me feel I might have achieved something for the remainder
of the day (sometimes) – like that smug sensation of getting up,
getting dressed to go for a run before work, before the masses stir.
Something I haven’t done for a century.... There’s a selection of
pencil stubs of various grades, from the humble HB up to an exotic
9B fighting for space on the bedside table-top. A pencil sharpener
and an old ashtray to catch any pencil shavings. Most mornings I
don’t have an idea what I’m going to attempt to put on paper, this
morning my brain is a lump of flintstone. Pencil has always been
my weapon of choice. This morning before the sketching I
completed a simple Guardian Codeword, also in pencil, I like the
satisfying act of lettering the squares. But now I’m looking at a
blank page. I’ve switched on BBC Radio 4 for the news, the
headlines, hoping something might trigger something. Other
mornings my sleeping brain may have already concocted some ideas
before I’ve woken, but not this morning. The thunderstorms
dominate the items. It is Instagram that has been the destiny of
these daily drawings, that and the outside possibility that there
could be a book out of this, not a chance, it would take a year to
come to publication even if a publisher was interested....anyway to
date it’s Instagram I’m polluting, clogging up the feed, busking for
hearts, farming for encouragement from front-line artists and other
apostles who trail me. But recently I’ve been finding it difficult to
produce any worthwhile sketching...I’m tired of this virus, I’m sick
and bored with the daily Downing Street so-called briefings, I want
to stop but it’s as the government repeats, ‘tiny steps’ to get back to
normal. I have, as a bookmark on this bedside table-top, an auction-
house bidding card in a lovely black Franklin Gothic Condensed
style typeface – the auctioneer’s hymn, ‘going, going, gone!’ worms
into my mind, this would make a good title of a drawing for perhaps
a final Instagram post, something else I want to get off.
‘What Day is It?’ has also been a recurring theme for my
drawings. I write it out – I’ve turned on YouTube, there’s a Bob
Dylan live recording from back in the 1960s. I end up doing a head,
filling the page face-on, it’s experimental. I’m pushing the medium
of graphite as far as a bed-ridden doodle will allow me. I’m almost
excited at the potential of what I’m trying out, a new technique that
is so simple, why haven’t I done it before? It is a fleeting satisfying
moment, a quick fix. Within half an hour it’s on Instagram.
I love drawing with a pencil. I’ve always liked the humble
pencil. In the 1980s up until around 1989 a good proportion of my
commissioned illustration output was predominately pencil,
charcoal and collage. If I did use a pen, most of it was faking
spontaneity, repeating an image on another sheet over the original
‘sketch’, ironing out the imperfections with the aid of a lightbox.
Tedious. Soul-destroying. A combination of events encouraged me to
switch almost entirely to a dip-pen and ink. The reproduction
quality of any subtlety in a pencil drawing would disappear,
especially in a newspaper, coupled with the fact my originals were
the size of a dining room table-top seating up to ten diners.
My intelligence is expressed through drawing, my ideas evolve
more freely through the physical act of drawing, more often than
not it is a mystery. It is a gift some say, I frequently answer it is a
curse. But thank God I do draw.
 In his freewheeling, ‘stream of consciousness’ 2020 Covid diary, David Hughes
fused personal experience with television news bulletins, political commentary and
satire.

From as early as I can remember I was always drawing. Maybe being

brought up as an ‘only child’ (although I had three brothers and a sister,
by the time I was eighteen months old they had all left home), it was an
escape, a way to entertain myself. I would draw imaginary cowboys,
footballers, pop groups, give them names, draw their portraits. Never
wrote stories, just invented characters.
At eight my nativity drawing was declared the best in the class by the
class bully, John Woods, mine being the only solo effort. All the others
had been group creations. At sixteen, at secondary school, for one
afternoon a handful of us had the opportunity to draw from life, two
student teachers who posed for us (fully clothed). I couldn’t believe I was
at school and actually drawing from a model. Very important afternoon.
It was the first time I’d ever drawn a living person from life. Life
drawing became my way of getting through art school (Twickenham
College of Technology) from sixteen years of age to leaving at twenty and
attempting to go freelance. For two, maybe three years of that course I
also used a sketchbook, but the practice slowly dwindled out. During the
freelance career a sketchbook became a luxury – something I might take
away but rarely use (does a plumber take on holiday his bag of plungers
and blow lamps?). Maybe I might use a sketchbook for trying out story
ideas, but that was all.
It was Walking The Dog (Jonathan Cape, 2009) that brought me back
to using a sketchbook, and I’ve used one ever since. Drawing events from
your own past is a powerful method of evoking memories that have
almost disappeared. In Walking The Dog I surprised myself with
likenesses from forty years or so ago through drawing without the aid of
photographs....
Of course, drawing with ink raises the bar – it focuses the mind, the
indelible mark on that expensive sheet of white paper coupled with the
process of leaving it until the deadline is almost flying past was the way I
worked as a professional illustrator. These days it’s mostly pencil. The
drawings here are all drawn this past thirteen months (2020–21), and
most are created in bed and therefore in graphite. The briefing drawings
are all done live, as are the newsreaders.
 ‘I did it with my own little pencil, nary a camera.
Just drawing. I felt I could do better, be clearer
and more precise’

Robert Weaver: The

bare essentials

Described by the author Alexander Roob as ‘the most significant

American illustrator of his time’, Robert Weaver, or ‘The Weave’
as he was often affectionately known by his students at the School
of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, has only recently begun to
receive the acclaim and wider appreciation that he deserves.
Weaver’s importance to the field of documentary drawing or ‘visual
journalism’ is immeasurable. His impact exerts itself not only
through his innovative illustration works for major US magazines
and journals of the 1950s to 1970s, but also through his work
alongside Marshall Arisman in building and teaching on the
renowned MFA Illustration as Visual Essay programme at SVA from
its inception in 1984.
Roob’s observation opens the essay that accompanies one of
Weaver’s previously unpublished experimental picturebooks, A
Pedestrian View: The Vogelman Diary, brought out by Verlag
Kettler in 2012. Produced at a time when his eyesight was failing,
The Vogelman Diary takes the form of a sequence of painterly
gouache images of urban life seen from pavement level, each one
with roughly pencilled text in capitals beneath the image. The text
reads across the pages, obliquely connecting to the images.
 Weaver was uncompromising in regarding his work as highly
personal, and was known for his ‘take it or leave it’ attitude to
many of those who commissioned his work. He had never studied
Illustration or Commercial Art, but spent two years in Venice
studying Classical Painting at the Academia while staying with an
aunt. In a wide-ranging interview with Wendy Coates-Smith in a
1981 issue of Illustrators, he recalled how he fell in love with New
York City, to which he had moved on his return from Italy, and
where he would spend whole days drawing:
It was such a visual city – it still is. I used to ride on the elevated
subway, getting off at various platforms and making drawings. I
went everywhere. I would get on the subway in the morning with a
sketchbook, and didn’t care where, and would end up somewhere in
Queens or Brooklyn. I would get off at some arbitrary station and
would start walking in this alien land making sketches. By the end
of the day I would come back with twenty drawings, rather like a
hunter coming back with some fish or some rabbits.
Weaver claimed to have little knowledge of art beyond the
Renaissance at the time. He had hoped to become a mural painter.
But his gritty, direct approach to drawing brought him commissions
in the early 1950s to create visual reports for magazine features on
crime. In characteristically prickly manner, he recalled:
I think my drawing style seemed to be so crude alongside the
styles of the established commercial illustrators of the time…my
way of drawing human beings seemed to art directors to be a way
appropriate to the drawing of criminals. To the advertising man, I
obviously represented the outsider, somebody who didn’t consume
the proper products, who hadn’t been to the right finishing schools.
Clearly I would be the right person to draw a criminal.
But Weaver’s reputation grew, his visual reportage challenging
the ubiquitous use (and perceived higher status) of journalistic
photography. His visual essays were commissioned by, among
others, Esquire, Life, Sports Illustrated and Fortune. At the latter
he was commissioned in the late 1950s by Leo Leonni, who later
became a renowned children’s picturebook-maker:
 Leonni was sending me out to do coverage of foundries and
industries. He was a superb art director and helped me at a time
when I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. He taught me a
couple of lessons… I went out with a sketchpad and pencil. I did a
lot of drawings and then I coloured them up later. I did it with my
own little pencil, nary a camera. Just drawing. I felt I could do
better, be clearer and more precise.
 Robert Weaver managed to fuse observational drawing with illustration to create
gritty, direct reportage of highly charged moments.

In A Pedestrian View: The Vogelman Diaries, Weaver enigmatically juxtaposes

painting and crudely written text.

As a teacher at SVA, Weaver was legendary, greatly admired by

generations of students for his honesty and integrity. One of his former
students, Kevin McCloskey, later recalled that when he and his fellow
students gathered for a group critique on a project to draw construction
activity, Weaver was less than impressed by the volume of work
produced:
He told us he found our excuses much more fascinating than our
drawings, and said he hoped we could someday get that sort of narrative
power in our artwork. Brutal. He insisted that we draw from life rather
than photos whenever possible. He was very keen on what historians call
primary material. He told a story about an art student he met at a bus
stop. The student was headed up to the picture file at the New York
Public Library.
‘What sort of photo reference are you looking for?’ Weaver asked.
‘A bus.’ said the student.
‘What sort of bus?’ he asked.
‘A regular bus. A New York City bus.’
‘Why don’t you stay on this corner and draw a bus stopped in
traffic?’
‘Photos are better’, said the student as he hopped on the bus.
 ‘His passion for drawing and for the importance
of a love of subject meant that he became
increasingly alienated from the world of fine art‘

John Minton:
Reportage for
advertising

During the late 1940s and into the mid-1950s, John Minton was one
of the most celebrated painter–illustrators of his generation. He
was evangelical in his belief in the role of observation as the key to
visual art as a whole. His passion for drawing and for the
importance of a love of subject, meant that he became increasingly
alienated from the world of fine art as the post-war mood of
neoromantic landscape was swept away by the arrival of Abstract
Expressionism in Britain. But alongside his paintings, the best of his
prolific output of illustration work has, over time, become at least as
highly appreciated for the passion that he put into it.
In a 1952 lecture given to students of the City of Birmingham
College of Arts & Crafts titled Speculations on the Contemporary
Painter, Minton spoke about the importance of a deep engagement
with subject if the artist is to develop and grow. After observing the
tendency of many art students to throw together a few bits and
pieces in order to draw or paint a still life in the hope that
‘something will happen’, he asserts:
It will only happen if it is really done with love, otherwise it
won’t.… It’s like a blacksmith having all the appropriate tools, but
no fire. He can hammer away indefinitely but nothing will happen –
not even abstract sculpture. For it’s something to do with having a
real love for the subject, having a real anxiety it will escape: not just
tolerating it as a possible subject, but loving it. Drawing is the key,
the preliminary enquiry, and is so closely bound up with the art of
painting that the two cannot be separated.
These strongly held sentiments are made visual as much in his
illustration work as in his paintings. In one of his most celebrated
books, the travel journal Time Was Away, his eighty-seven line
drawings and eight four-colour letterpress line-block prints are the
result of three weeks of travelling around Corsica in high summer
with the writer Alan Ross, making drawing after drawing from
direct observation. Some of these were used in the book as they
were, others were worked up and developed into more graphic form
with greater use of solid blacks to give more weight to the page.
And of course the drawings underpinned the printmaking process
through which the eight four-colour plates were executed. It is
Minton’s absolute immersion in his subject that makes this book
such an evocative classic.
But the kind of ‘love of subject’ that Minton spoke about in his
lecture was not dependent on that subject being as obviously
seductive as a Mediterranean island. Shortly after the trip to
Corsica, as his reputation continued to grow, Minton was
commissioned by the Imperial Smelting Corporation, through the
advertising agents Everetts, to make drawings at their Avonmouth
plant near Bristol. This was part of Everetts’s enlightened policy of
commissioning a range of leading artists of the day to document
visually the processes employed by their various industrial clients.
Minton made a number of drawings in pen and wash on location of
these great industrial interiors, populated by workers performing
their various tasks, dwarfed by the great metal shapes. Some of
these were then formalized into illustrations that were more
carefully composed and simplified for reproduction in
advertisements. These appeared in trade journals as well as mass-
market publications such as Punch magazine and The Times
newspaper.

In the late 1940s, John Minton distilled expansive location drawings and paintings
into carefully composed black and white illustrations, designed to be reproduced at
small scale in various trade publications.
 Illustration and photography
‘Making the reference material serve the artist’s creative
vision, as distinct from allowing it to lead the way, is of
paramount importance’

Robert Weaver’s evangelical advocacy for drawing from direct observation

can be seen primarily in the context of education, even though Weaver
himself pushed it further into the making of illustration for reproduction.
While photography can even be damaging when learning to draw, it is and
has been throughout its history an important aid to many illustrators, directly
and indirectly. How it is used by the artist is crucial. Making the reference
material serve the artist’s creative vision, as distinct from allowing it to lead
the way, is of paramount importance. Highly representational illustration has
drifted in out of fashion over the years, but this kind of work, often depicting
groups of figures in carefully posed ‘tableaux’, has inevitably involved
working from studio photography of models in the tradition of such masters
as Norman Rockwell in America and Harry Hants in Britain. The most
successful of such artists would command high fees for magazine covers,
allowing them to pay models and run their own photography studios. Most of
the artists working in this idiom in the mid-twentieth century would have had
a solid grounding in formal painting from observation before working
primarily from photographic reference, giving them the knowledge and means
through which to understand the underlying three-dimensional forms behind
the two-dimensional photographs.
The subtler and perhaps deeper influence of photography is revealed
when speaking with many illustrators who cite the work of particular
photographers as major influences on their approach to their work. We have
seen how important the work of photographers, notably that of Josef
Koudelka, has been to Bill Bragg’s approach to image-making. Similarly, the
Canadian illustrator and picturebook-maker Sydney Smith has spoken of the
profound influence of street photographers such as Lee Friedlander and
Robert Frank on his work and Jon McNaught has explained how his own
photographs, taken on location at museums, campsites, motorway service
stations and from windows of trains, play an important role in building up a
library of visually anecdotal reference for ‘sense of place’. What all of these
diverse approaches to making use of photography share is a clear
understanding of the need for it to be subordinate to the artist’s purpose.
Normal Rockwell’s cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post were arrived at through a series
of detailed preparatory drawings from his carefully staged studio photography.
 Facility [in drawing] is a dangerous thing. Where there is too
much technical ease the brain stops criticising. Don’t let the
hand fall into a smart way of putting the mind to sleep.
John Sloan

When embarking on a course in illustration, many students express their

urgent desire to acquire a ‘style’. Younger students especially yearn for
a visual formula that is instantly identifiable as their own, and are often
convinced that this is the sole aim of their studies – to be instantly
recognizable through their work, like so many of their illustration
heroes.
The word ‘style’ has many meanings, but in this context as a noun it
is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as:
a way of doing something, especially one that is typical of a
person, group of people, place or time.
There is nothing easier than manufacturing a ‘style’: a particular formula
of dots, squiggles or cubes, a very specific colour palette or manner of
using a particular medium. A personal horror of mine is the style of fake
spontaneity – carefully controlled swishes and swirls, designed to be
mistaken for preparatory underdrawing – to give a ‘sketchbook
aesthetic’. Of course, another of the word’s meanings is closely
connected to the idea of fashion or trend. Illustration in the 1980s and
1990s was especially style-driven, with many superficially seductive
but facile stylistic tricks on display by practitioners whose work has
long disappeared from sight. Graduates from illustration courses would
regularly enjoy whirlwind stellar exposure for three to four years before
being cruelly cast aside by agents and commissioners in favour of ‘the
next big thing’. This damaged the standing and status of illustration for
some time.
Paradoxically, a genuine individual visual vocabulary can only
emerge unsought, through the long process of searching instead for a
way to make sense of something seen or imagined or both. Through
intense focus on the subject itself, rather than the marks being made in
response to it, gradually, involuntarily and inevitably an identity forces
itself through and imposes itself upon the artist, like it or not. Or, as the
information for potential applicants to Marshall Arisman’s MFA
programme in Illustration as Visual Essay at New York’s School of
Visual Arts states, ‘It begins with developing a personal vision. Vision
is not style.’
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ardizzone, Edward, The Born Illustrator, in Motif No 1 (ed. Ruari McLean), London: The Shenval
Press Ltd, 1958
— Some Random Thoughts on the Art of Illustration, in Ark: The Journal of the Royal College of
Art, No. 11, London: RCA, 1954
Bang, Molly, Picture This: How Pictures Work, San Francisco: Chronicle, 2000
Brown, Christopher, An Alphabet of London, London: Merrell, 2012
Carlin, Laura, Ten Days in Tokyo, London: Royal College of Art, 2004
Carline, Richard, Draw They Must: A History of the Teaching and Examining of Art, London:
Edward Arnold, 1968
Davis, Paul (ed.), Drawing SVA, Issue 1, School of Visual Arts: New York, 1997
Garth, Paul, Creative Pencil Drawing, London: Studio Vista, 1964
Hayes, Colin, Grammar of Drawing: for Artists and Designers, London: Studio Vista, 196
Heller, Steven and Arisman, Marshall, The Education of the Illustrator, New York: Allworth Press,
2000
Hobbs, Eric, Drawing for Advertising, London: The Studio, 1956
Hogarth, Paul, Drawing Architecture: A Creative Approach, New York: Watson-Guptill, 1973
Hogarth, Paul, The Artist as Reporter, London: Gordon Fraser, 1986
Hogarth, Paul, Paul Hogarth’s American Album, London: Lion and Unicorn Press, 1973
Jacobs, Ted Seth, Drawing with an Open Mind: Reflections from a Drawing Teacher, New York:
Watson-Guptill Publications, 1991
Jones, Barbara, Water-colour Painting: A Practical Guide, London: A&C Black, 1960
Kingman, Lee, The Illustrator’s Notebook, Boston: The Horn Book Inc., 1978
Kingston, Angela, What is Drawing?, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2003
Lamb, Lynton, Drawing for Illustration, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962
Lamb, Lynton, Preparation for Painting, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954
Lamb, Lynton, The True Illustrator, in Motif No 2, ed. Ruari McLean), London: The Shenval Press
Ltd, 1959
Llewellyn, Sacha and Liss, Paul, Evelyn Dunbar: The Lost Works, Chichester: Pallant House Gallery,
2015
Lobel, Michael, John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014
Mackie, George, Lynton Lamb: Illustrator, London: The Scolar Press, 1978
Marr, Andrew, A Short Book About Drawing, London: Quadrille Publishing Ltd, 2013
Martin, Douglas, The Telling Line, London: Julia McRae, 1989
McLanathan, Richard, The Brandywine Heritage, New York: Brandywine River Museum/ NY
Graphic Soc. Ltd, 1971
Micklewright, Keith, Drawing: Mastering the Language of Visual Expression, London: Laurence
King Publishing, 2005
Minton, John, Speculations on the Contemporary Painter, Birmingham: Birmingham College of Arts
and Crafts, 1952
Read, Herbert, Education Through Art, London: Faber & Faber, 1946
Roob, Alexander, Inside the Reactor, in Robert Weaver, a Pedestrian View: The Vogelman Diary,
Bönen, Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2012
Ruskin, John, The Elements of Drawing: In Three Letters to Beginners, London: Smith, Elder & Co.,
1857
Salisbury, Martin, The Illustrated Dust Jacket, 1920–1970, London: Thames & Hudson, 2017
Salisbury, Martin, The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower and Other Works by John Minton,
Norwich: Mainstone Press, 2017
Schwarcz, Joseph H., Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children’s Literature,
Chicago: American Library Association, 1982
Simpson, Ian, Drawing: Seeing and Observation, London: A & C Black, 1981
Stanton, Jane, The Art of Life Drawing, London: Mitchel Beazley, 1990
Topolski, Feliks, The London Spectacle, 1935, London: The Bodley Head, 1935
Various, The London Art Schools, London: Tate Publishing, 2016
Vernon Lord, John, Drawing Upon Drawing: 50 Years of Illustrating, Brighton: University of
Brighton, 2014
White, Gabriel, Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator, London: The Bodley Head, 1979
White, Gwen, A Book of Pictorial Perspective, London: John Murray, 1954
 CREDITS

2 © Yann Kebbi
4 Collection Martin Salisbury
7 Charles Edmund Brock: study for 7b. Author’s collection
7 Charles Edmund Brock. From Holmes Breakfast Table series by Oliver Wendell Holmes. London: J.
M. Dent & Co., 1902
9 Courtesy the Lynton Lamb estate
10, 11 Stanley Badmin, courtesy Chris Beetles Gallery for the S R Badmin Estate
12 Charles Edmund Brock: pencil study for Mr Punch. Author’s collection
15 © Vyara Boyadjieva www.vyaraboya.com @vyaraboya
16 Photo Bettina Strenske/imageBROKER/Shutterstock
17 Cambridge School of Art archive
18 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA1943.95). Photo Ashmolean Museum, University of
Oxford/ Bridgeman Images
19 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA1940.1.92). Photo Ashmolean Museum, University
of Oxford/ Bridgeman Images
21 Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (138.1940). Digital image, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
23 © Michal Shalev
25–31 Courtesy Isabelle Arsenault
33 © The Ardizzone Trust. From Jubilee: 1898-1948, London, Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts,
1948
34 Heera Cha
35 Cambridge School of Art archive
36 F Gregory Brown. London, Studio Publications, 1940
36 Artist unknown. Famous Art School Westport, Connecticut, 1964
37 Artist unknown. Barcelona, Editorial Miguela A. Salvatella, undated
37 Artist unknown. Madrid, El Magisterial Español, 1935
39 © The Ardizzone Trust, Private collection
39 © The Ardizzone Trust. From Brief to Council by Henry Cecil. London: Michael Joseph, 1958
40 George Cruikshank, courtesy the Charles Dickens Museum, London
41 George Cruikshank. From Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1846
42 Courtesy the Lynton Lamb estate
43 © The Ardizzone Trust. Cairo, PR Publications (‘for the Three Services in the Middle East’), 1942
44 © Martin Salisbury
47 © Estate of Feliks Topolski
48 © Martin Salisbury
49 © Estate of John Minton/Bridgeman Images
50–51 Cambridge School of Art archive
53 Cambridge School of Art archive. Photos by Martin Salisbury
55 Private collection, Vienna
56 Estate of Susan Einzig. Reproduction by kind permission of Hetty Einzig
59 © Pam Smy
60–61 © Seoungjun Baek
62–63 Cambridge School of Art archive
65 Eric Hobbs, Drawing for Advertising. London: Studio Publications, 1956
66 © Martin Salisbury
67 © Anna Ring
68 © Nastya Smirnova
68 © Hye Young Kim
69 © Hanieh Ghashghaei
71–75 © Christopher Brown
77 From Paul Hogarth’s American Album: drawings, 1962–65 by Paul Hogarth. London: Lion and
Unicorn Press, 1973. © Estate of Paul Hogarth
78 © Aude Van Ryn
79 © The Estate of Barbara Jones. From Water-Colour Painting: A Practical Guide by Barbara
Jones. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960
81 Gwen White. From A Book of Pictorial Perspective by Gwen White. London: John Murray, 1953
82–83 © Martin Salisbury
85 © Martin Salisbury
86–87 © Olga Shevchenko shevolya.com @shevolya_illustration
89 © Vyara Boyadjeva www.vyaraboya.com @vyaraboya
91 © Charlotte Bownass www.charlottebownass @charlottebownass
92 Sheila Robinson, by kind permission of Chloë Cheese and the Fry Art Gallery and Museum, Saffron
Walden www.fryartgallery.org
93 © Jo Spooner www.jospoonerillustration.com @jojospooney
94–95 © Martin Salisbury
96, 97, 97 © Beatrice Alemagna
97, 97 © Angela Brooksbank
98–99 © Becky Brown www.becky-brown.com @beckybrownartandillustration
100 Cambridge School of Art archive
101 © Becky Brown
103 Courtesy of Bernie Fuchs Art, LLC and Courtesy of Taraba Illustration Art
104 © Becky Palmer www.beckypalmer.co.uk
107 © Kristin Roskifte www.kristinroskifte.no @kristin_roskifte
109 © The Ardizzone Trust. From The Saturday Book. London: Hutchinson, 1951
111–113 © Yann Kebbi
115 © Simon Bartram
117–120 © Bill Bragg @bill_bragg_illustration
121 From GHOSTLY TALES © 2017 Chronicle Books. Illustrated by Bill Bragg. Used with Permission
from Chronicle Books, LLC. www.ChronicleBooks.com
123 © Nigel Robinson [email protected]
124–125 © Hayley Wells www.hayleywellsillustration.co.uk @hwillustrator
126 James Dawson. Author’s collection
127 © Gill Smith
127 © Marina Ruiz Fernandez www.marinaruizillustration.com
129–131 © John Vernon Lord. Drawings from notebooks and diaries by John Vernon Lord (1976, 2002,
2004 and 2008). Published in John’s Journal Jottings, Oxford: The Inky Parrot Press, 2009
133–135 © Sally Dunne
137–141 © Alexis Deacon. From Soonchild by Russell Hoban. London: Walker Books, 2012
142 Ronald Searle, Cambridge School of Art archive
145 © Jon McNaught. From Dockwood by Jon McNaught. London: Nobrow Ltd, 2012
147 Courtesy Emma Mason on behalf of the Robert Tavener estate
148–149 Trevor Willoughby, Homes & Gardens, Sept 1957
151–154 © David Humphries
157 Edward McKnight Kauffer © Simon Rendall
159–161 By kind permission of the Evelyn Dunbar estate
163–167 © Pablo Auladell www.pabloauladell.com @pabloauladell
169, 176–179 © Axel Scheffler
171–173 © Fifi Kuo
174–175 © Ellie Snowdon www.elliesnowdon.co.uk @snowdon_illo @esillustration
181 Arthur Rackham. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: William Heinemann, 1907
183–185 © Victoria Turnbull www.victurnbull.com @vic_turnbull
187–191 Sheila Robinson, by kind permission of Chloë Cheese and the Fry Art Gallery,
www.fryartgallery.org
193 Winsor McCay. From Little Nemo in Slumberland (monthly strip), New York Herald, September
1907
195–197 © Isabel Greenberg. From Glass Town. London: Jonathan Cape, 2020
www.isabelgreenberg.co.uk @isabel_greenberg
199–201 © Jon McNaught. From Kingdom. London: Nobrow Ltd (2018)
203 Jules Chéret/Alamy Stock Photo
205 Photograph by Emma Brown Photography. Fabricators, Riot of Colour – Josh Mowll
206–207 ©Kerry Lemon www.kerrylemon.co.uk
209 Frank Newbould. From Lesson Twenty-Three: Poster Drawing, London: The British & Dominions
School of Drawing, c. 1923
211 E H Shepard. Punch Cartoon Library/TopFoto
213–215 © Paul Slater www.paulslater.me @paulslaterpics
217 © Laura Carlin
218–219 © 1946, 1986 All drawings reproduced with the kind permission of the Ronald Searle Cultural
Trust and the Sayle Literary Agency
221–223 © David Hughes
225–227 Robert Weaver, sketchbook drawings
226 From Robert Weaver: A Pedestrian View: The Vogelman Diary edited by Alexander Roob.
Bönen, Germany: Kettler Verlag, February 28, 2013
229 © Estate of John Minton/Bridgeman Images
231 Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright © 1951 the Norman
Rockwell Family Entities
234 © The Ardizzone Trust. Visiting Dieppe, from Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and
Graphic Arts, No 13 (New Series), edited by Oliver Simon. London: Signature, 1951
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to the many, many people whose assistance and support has made this book possible,
especially the students and immediate colleagues at Cambridge School of Art whose work has inspired
and informed my own. At Thames & Hudson, I am especially grateful to editor Kate Edwards, designer
Isabel Roldán, picture researcher Maria Ranauro and production controller Susanna Ingram. Further
thanks go to my PhD students, Beatriz Lostalé Seijo and Flavia Zorilla Drago for their help with
research. And finally, I am deeply indebted to all of the artists - students, graduates and professionals
who have so generously allowed me to reproduce their work and who have taken time to share their
thoughts and working practices.
 INDEX

All page numbers refer to the 2022 print edition

Note: italicised page references indicate illustrations, and the suffix ‘c’ indicates captions with
substantive information.

A
absurd, the 210, 212
academic drawing 22, 38, 90, 176
advertising 20, 64c, 65, 102c, 202–9, 203, 205, 206, 207, 209, 224, 228–29, 229
Alemagna, Beatrice 96, 97
‘anecdotal’ drawing 90
animals, drawing 14c, 98–101, 98–99, 100, 101, 170–79, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179
animation 136, 194
Archer, Bruce 34–35
Ardizzone, Edward 32c, 33, 37, 38–43, 39, 90, 106, 108–9, 136, 156, 162, 212; ‘The Born Illustrator’ 38;
Brief to Counsel (Cecil) 39; Diary of a Holiday Afloat 108c, 109; Parade magazine 43
Arisman, Marshall 224, 233
Arsenault, Isabelle 8, 24–31, 31; Collette’s Lost Pet 27; Jane the Fox and Me (Britt) 30
atmosphere 58, 109, 116, 118, 132, 156, 165, 180–81, 194, 198–200, 208
Auladell, Pablo 162–67; La Feria Abandonada 162–65, 163–67
authorial graphic storytelling 8, 20, 110, 113, 116, 144, 192–201, 193, 195–97, 199, 200, 201

B
Badmin, Stanley 8c; Christmas Week, Trafalgar Square 8c, 10–11
Baek, Seoungjun 58c, 60–61
Bartram, Simon 114–15; Monday Man 115; Up for the Cup! 114
Bawden, Edward 22, 70, 72, 158, 186, 202
Beddington, Jack 202
Beer, Friederike Maria 54c, 55
Bennett, Arnold 157
Berger, John 8
‘blind drawing’ 48, 116; ‘semi-blind’ drawing 46c, 48
book illustration 54, 76, 156–67, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166–67; see also children’s
books; picturebooks; individual books
Bownass, Charlotte 90c, 91
Boyadjieva, Vyara 15, 88, 89
Bragg, Bill 116–21, 230; ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ 120, 121; Erith Yacht Club 119; The
Illustrated Dust Jacket: 1920–1970 (Salisbury) 118; Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Kafka)
118; Wilton’s Music Hall 117
Broadley, John 8
Brock, Charles Edmund 4, 6c
Brock, H. M.: Breakfast Table (Holmes) 6c, 7
Brookshank, Angela 97
Brown, Becky 98–99, 101
Brown, Christopher 70–75; An Alphabet of London 70–72, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75
Brown, Gregory: How to Draw Trees 36
Brunelleschi, Filippo 80
Burgos, Rafa 162

C
caricature 34, 150, 210
Carlin, Laura 216c; Ten Days in Tokyo 217
Carline, Richard 35; Draw They Must 15, 35
Carrington, Noel 158, 186
Carroll, Lewis 180c
cartoons 182, 210
Cassandre (Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron) 202
Cha, Heera 34
character development 124, 144, 168–79, 182
Cheese, Chloë 186
Chéret, Jules 202; Cosmydor soap poster 203
children, drawing 92, 92, 93, 96, 97
children, drawing by 15–16, 30, 182, 198, 222
children’s books 8, 20, 23, 35–36, 76, 114, 116, 158, 168, 178, 192, 226
Christie, Agatha: Crooked House 132
Coates-Smith, Wendy 224
collage 65, 68c, 69, 220
colour 42, 72, 84–87, 88, 109, 140, 184, 194, 198, 200, 208; coloured pencils 66c, 67, 88, 89, 182, 198;
testing 8c, 124, 126, 172
comics 112, 114, 136, 141, 162, 192, 200
commissions 70, 112, 146, 150, 152, 153, 156, 162, 208, 224, 228
composition 14, 46, 70–72, 71, 76–79, 88, 118, 198, 208
Cook, Olive 186
Cruikshank, George 38, 40, 41
Cueva de las Manos, Patagonia 14c, 16

D
Daumier, Honoré-Victorin 38
Dawson, James 126
Deacon, Alexis 136–41; Soonchild (Hoban) 136–41, 138–39, 140, 141
Delaroche, Paul 102
digital processes 22, 66, 144, 158, 186, 194, 198–200, 207
Donaldson, Julia 176, 178
doodles 122–27, 123, 128, 129–31, 182
Dorne, Albert 36, 37c
drawing: definitions 14–19, 30, 165, 200, 204; as a form of language 6–8, 14–15; painting, boundaries
with 14, 16, 228
Dulac, Edmund 180
Dunbar, Evelyn 158–61; Brockley School mural 160; A Farm Dictionary 160; Gardeners’ Choice
161; A Gardener’s Diary 158, 159, 161
Dunne, Sally 132, 133–35
Dürer, Albrecht 210

E
editorial illustration 110, 111, 116, 144, 146–55, 147, 148–49, 152, 153, 154–55, 176–78, 198, 204
Einzig, Susan: The Children’s Song Book (Poston) 54c, 56–57
Eliot, T. S. 6–8

F
fantasy 180–81, 194
fine art 8, 20, 22, 24, 35, 36, 110–12, 228
‘finished,’ psychology of 136
Flecknoe, Richard 42
form 54, 58, 88, 102, 110
Forster, E. M. 144
Frank, Robert 230
Freedman, Barnett 202
Friedlander, Lee 230
Fuchs, Bernie 102c, 103

G
Ghashghaei, Hanieh 69
Gide, André 128, 144
Glackens, William 180; Washington Square 21
‘Golden Section’ or ‘Golden Mean’ 78
graphic design 22, 24, 36, 97c, 116
graphic storytelling 8, 20, 110, 113, 116, 144, 192–201, 193, 195–97, 199, 200, 201
Greenberg, Isabel 8, 194–97; Glass Town 194, 195, 196, 197

H
Hale, Kathleen 158
Hants, Harry 230
Heyer, Georgette: Venetia 132
Hoban, Russell 136–40
Hobbs, Eric: Drawing for Advertising 65
Hogarth, Paul 76c, 77, 100, 101c, 218; The Artist as Reporter 216
Hogarth, William 210
Holland, Brad 22
Holmes, Oliver Wendell: Breakfast Table 6c, 7
Hopper, Edward 22
Hughes, David 220–27; ‘Covid diary’ 221, 222, 223; Walking the Dog 222
humour 150, 210–11, 211
Humphries, David 150–55, 151, 152, 153

I
imagination 15, 32, 34, 35, 38–42, 70–72, 156, 180, 182, 222; from observation 105–42
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 16

J
Jones, Barbara: Water-colour Painting: A Practical Guide 78, 79
Joyce, James 128

K
Kebbi, Yann 110–13, 111; Howdy 113; Lontano: Fondation Kebbi 113; M le Magazine du Monde
112; Mouvement 2
Kim, Hye-Young 68
Klinger, Max 16
Kollwitz, Käthe 132
Koudelka, Josef 116, 230
Kuo, Fifi 170–75, 172, 173; The Perfect Sofa 171

L
Lamb, Lynton 6, 37, 90, 106; County Town 42, 43c; Drawing for Illustration 6, 8, 9, 22, 66;
Preparation for Painting 212; ‘The True Illustrator’ 42
Lane, Allen 186
Lawrence, D. H. 186
Lee, Alan 180
Lemon, Kerry 204–7; Harvey Nichols 205, 206, 207
Leonardo da Vinci 210
Leonni, Leo 224–26
Leyendecker, J. C. 202
life, drawing from 38–42, 102, 106, 110, 176, 182, 194, 198, 212, 226; animals 98, 100; classes 33, 38,
62–63, 90, 110, 114, 116, 212, 222; see also observation, drawing from
light 30, 39, 54, 58, 62–63, 84c, 132, 198
line 52, 54–58, 76c, 77, 88, 141, 194; to describe tone 64–65, 65
linocut 66, 70–75, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 144
lithography 66, 80, 144, 202c
Lobel, Michael: John Sloan 22
López Medina, Julián 162
Lord, John Vernon 128–31; Drawing Upon Drawing 36–37; The Giant Jam Sandwich 128; John’s
Journal Jottings 129–31
Lynch, P. J. 180

M
magazine illustration 22, 43, 102c, 103, 111, 146, 147, 148–49, 180, 202, 210, 211, 216, 224–26, 230;
see also individual magazines
mark-making 66–69, 67, 68, 69, 122, 141
Marr, Andrew: A Short Book About Drawing 16
Martin, Douglas: The Telling Line 54
mathematical formulae 78
McCay, Winsor 192c; Little Nemo in Slumberland 193
McCloskey, Kevin 226
McKnight Kauffer, Edward: Elsie and the Child (Bennett) 157
McLanathan, Richard: The Brandywine Heritage 22–23
McLuhan, Marshall 8
McNaught, Jon 8, 144, 198–201, 200, 201, 230; Birchfield Close 198; Dockwood 145, 198; Kingdom
(McNaught) 198, 199
‘meaning’ 6–8, 36, 110–12, 128
memory, drawing from 42, 46, 70, 106, 108–9, 114, 118, 122, 153, 182, 208, 212, 216, 222; muscle
memory 114, 118, 144
Meninsky, Bernard 38
Minton, John 46c, 49, 228–29, 228; ‘Speculations on the Contemporary Painter’ 6, 228; Time Was
Away 228
mistakes 54c, 66, 122, 182, 186
movement, drawing 46c, 50–51, 54, 76, 90–92, 96–97, 100–101, 106, 112, 170, 174, 194

N
narrative texts 6, 8, 92, 110, 124, 127, 136, 168, 172; see also graphic storytelling
Nash, Paul 22, 202
Newbould, Frank 202, 208–9; Poster Drawing 208; Ventnor 208, 209
newspaper illustration 22, 146, 150, 210, 213–15, 216, 220
Newton, Sir Isaac 153
Newton’s Cradle 150–55, 154–55
Nicholson, Ben 202
Nicholson, William 202
Nielsen, Kay 180
non-fiction 90, 156, 158
Norland, Ben 140

O
observation, drawing from 14–15, 16c, 32, 36–37, 46–48, 76, 80, 84, 88, 144, 230; Alemagna 97c;
animals 98, 99, 101c, 170; Ardizzone 38–42; Arsenault 24, 30; Boyadjieva 88, 89c; Bragg 116–18;
Brown (Becky) 99c; Brown (Christopher) 70–72; Dunne 132; Greenberg 194; Humphries 150; and
imagination 105–42; Kebbi 110; Lamb 42; McNaught 198; Minton 46c, 228; Scheffler 176; Snowdon
170; Topolski 46c; Turnbull 182; see also life, drawing from; reportage
Oxenbury, Helen 36

P
Pacioli, Luca 78
paint: acrylics 212; gouache 20c, 21, 54c, 182, 224; oil 24, 212; watercolour 78, 127, 132, 180, 200
painting 15–16, 78, 80, 84, 88, 102, 114, 158, 200, 212; ancient 14c, 16, 80; drawing, boundaries with 14,
16, 228
pastels 66, 132, 182
pen 39, 70, 85, 88, 220, 228; brush-pen 141; felt-tipped 198; reed pen 194; white ink 58c, 84c, 85
pencil 52, 64, 80, 127, 128, 132, 136, 140–41, 194, 220, 222; coloured pencils 67, 88, 89, 182, 198; for
initial composition 8c, 16c, 18–19, 29, 39, 158, 159, 182–84, 183, 184, 198, 199, 208, 212
people, drawing 76, 90–97, 106; Alemagna 96–97; Bartram 114, 115; Bownass 90c, 91; Brooksbank
97; Deacon 137; McNaught 200; Robinson 92; Roskifte 106c, 107; Salisbury 94–95; Scheffler
178; Slater 212; Spooner 92c, 93; Weaver 224; see also life, drawing from
perspective 80–83, 81, 82, 83
photography 22, 102, 116, 118, 146, 153, 194, 202, 224, 230; drawing from 72, 102, 114, 116, 198, 216,
226, 230
Photoshop, Adobe 22, 72, 153, 182, 198–200
Picasso, Pablo 15–16
Pick, Frank 202
picturebooks 8, 20, 23, 35–36, 76, 144, 168, 176–78, 192; see also authorial graphic storytelling;
children’s books
Piper, John 22
Pitz, Henry C. 32
posters 202, 208, 209
print processes 6, 54, 64, 66, 80, 186, 198, 202, 228
Pryde, James 202
Pyle, Howard 32–34, 35

R
Rackham, Arthur 180; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) 180c, 181
Ravilious, Eric 158, 186
reportage 76c, 77, 216–29, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 229
Ring, Anna 67
Robinson, Nigel 123
Robinson, Sheila 70, 92, 186–91; The Twelve Dancing Princesses (Grimm) 186, 187, 188–89, 190–
91
Rockwell, Norman 230; Art School For Everyone – Everywhere 36, 37c; Saturday Evening Post
230c, 231
Roob, Alexander 224
Roskifte, Kristin 106c, 107
Ross, Alan 228
Ruiz, Marina 127
Ruskin, John 35; The Elements of Drawing 32

S
Salisbury, Martin 46c, 48, 64c, 65, 80c, 82–83, 84c, 85, 94c, 94–95; The Illustrated Dust Jacket:
1920–1970 118
satire 20, 210, 211, 216, 221
scale 6, 52, 84c, 90c, 110, 141, 170, 182, 204; scaling up/down 16, 141, 206, 208, 212, 213, 229
Scheffler, Axel 176–79; Gruffalo (Donaldson) 169, 176, 177, 178, 178, 179; A Squash and a
Squeeze (Donaldson) 178
Schiaffino, Julio 114
Schiele, Egon: Woman with Arms Raised 55
Searle, Ronald 52c, 53, 90, 216–18, 218, 219; Forty Drawings 218c
Selznick, Brian 8
Sepúlveda, Andrés: ¡ya dibujo! 37
shadow 30, 58, 102, 116, 118, 132
Shalev, Michal 23
shape 30, 54, 58, 66, 76, 78, 144, 198–200
Shephard, E. H. 210c; Punch 211
Shevchenko, Olga 84c, 86–87
Sickert, Walter: Ennui 16c, 18–19
sketchbooks, artists’: Ardizzone 42; Arsenault 24, 25, 26, 28, 29; Auladell 162, 165; Baek 58c, 60–61;
Bartram 114; Bownass 90c, 91; Boyadjieva 15, 88, 89; Bragg 116, 118; Brown (Christopher) 70–
72; Cha 34; Deacon 136, 137; Dunne 132, 133–35; Greenberg 194, 195; Hughes 220, 222;
Humphries 150; Kebbi 110, 113; Kuo 170, 172; Lord 128, 129–31; McNaught 198, 200; Robinson
 (Sheila) 92, 186, 187, 188–89; Roskifte 106c, 107; Ruiz 127; Slater 212; Spooner 93; Turnbull 182;
Weaver 224, 226; Wells 124–25
sketchbooks, general 16c, 17, 42, 48, 60–61, 78, 122–27, 128, 132, 176, 233
Slater, Paul 212; ‘Eating Out’ 213–15
Sloan, John 180, 233
Smart, James 194
Smirnova, Nastya: Self-portrait, Cambodia 68
Smith, Gill 127
Smith, Sydney 230
Smy, Pam 58c, 59
Snowdon, Ellie 170–75; The Owl and the Pussycat 170, 174, 175
space 16, 54, 63c, 78c, 80, 88
Spooner, Jo 93
style 186, 232–33
Sutherland, Graham 202

T
Tamaki, Jillian 8
Tan, Shaun 8
Tavener, Robert: Homes and Gardens 147
tone 42, 46, 52, 58–63, 59, 60–61, 62, 63, 64, 66c, 67, 102, 109, 184, 198; line and 64, 65, 76c, 77;
perspective and 80, 88
tools and materials 52–53, 53, 58, 122, 194; charcoal 58c, 60–61, 62, 63c, 63, 114, 140–41, 194, 220;
erasers 58, 59, 60, 62, 63c, 63; tracing paper 71, 182, 183, 184; see also pen; pencil
Topolski, Feliks 46c, 47
Trillo, Manuel: Dibujo-Lenguage 37
Turnbull, Victoria 182–85, 183; Cloud Forest 185; Pandora 184; The Sea Tiger 183, 184
Turner, J. M. W. 132

V
van Dyck, Anthony 132
Van Ryn, Aude 78c, 78
visual journalism 20, 216–19, 224
visual journals see sketchbooks, general
visual language 24, 108, 122, 162

W
Weaver, Robert 224–27, 225, 226, 230; A Pedestrian View: The Vogelman Diary 224, 225–26
Webb, Brian 186
Wells, Hayley 124–25
White, Gabriel 42
White, Gwen 80c, 81; A Book of Pictorial Perspective 80
Willoughby, Trevor: Homes and Gardens 146c, 148–49
Wyeth, N. C. 22
 First published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by
Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX

First published in the United States of America in 2022 by

Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110

Drawing for Illustration © 2022 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London

Text © 2022 Martin Salisbury

ISBN 978-0-500-02331-0

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other
information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher.

This electronic version first published in 2022 in the United Kingdom in 2022 by
Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX

This electronic version first published in 2022 in the United States of America in 2022 by
Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110

eISBN 978-0-500-77759-6
eISBN for USA only 978-0-500-77760-2

To find out about all our publications, please visit

www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
www.thamesandhudson.com.au