A Companion to Illustration

Art and Theory

Alan Male, Dana Arnold, Alan Male

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119185567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A contemporary synthesis of the philosophical, theoretical and practical methodologies of illustration and its future development

Illustration is contextualized visual communication; its purpose is to serve society by influencing the many aspects of its cultural infrastructure; it dispenses knowledge and education, it commentates and delivers journalistic opinion, it persuades, advertises and promotes, it entertains and provides for all forms of narrative fiction. A Companion to Illustration explores the definition of illustration through cognition and research and its impact on culture. It explores illustration's boundaries and its archetypal distinction, the inflected forms of its parameters, its professional, contextual, educational and creative applications. This unique reference volume offers insights into the expanding global intellectual conversation on illustration through a compendium of readings by an international roster of scholars, academics and practitioners of illustration and visual communication.

Encompassing a wide range of thematic dialogues, the Companion offers twenty-five chapters of original theses, examining the character and making of imagery, illustration education and research, and contemporary and post-contemporary context and practice. Topics including conceptual strategies for the contemporary illustrator, the epistemic potential of active imagination in science, developing creativity in a polymathic environment, and the presentation of new insights on the intellectual and practical methodologies of illustration.

• Evaluates innovative theoretical and contextual teaching and learning strategies
• Considers the influence of illustration through cognition, research and cultural hypotheses
• Discusses the illustrator as author, intellectual and multi-disciplinarian
• Explores state-of-the-art research and contemporary trends in illustration
• Examines the philosophical, theoretical and practical framework of the discipline

A Companion to Illustration is a valuable resource for students, scholars and professionals in disciplines including illustration, graphic and visual arts, visual communications, cultural and media and advertising studies, and art history.

Part I
The Theory, Character, and Making of Imagery

1
Making Visible: Illustration Through Identification, Categorization, and Metaphor

Stuart Medley

Introduction

When it comes to communicating visually, there are essentially two means of making pictures, the photographic (which also includes film and video) and the chirographic (including any hand‐made means of depicting), and degrees of hybridity between. The first category has relatively narrow bandwidth. The second is extremely broad and is covered by what is referred to in this book as illustration. The chirographic may comprise pictures ranging from caricature to scientific illustration and infographics, from technical drawings and diagrams to the depictions in children's books and comics. Illustration needs an art theory that places it in the context of visual communication. Illustration is different to art in its intentionality, but even celebrated practitioners struggle to fully articulate its role and effectiveness in communicating an intended message (Medley 2013). It generally attaches to a written text or otherwise purposely imparts information or invokes in its beholder a particular esthetic response. At the same time, perhaps because certain illustrative modes share esthetics with visual art, the visual communication tasks to which illustration is put may be assumed to be less practical and more emotional than those deliberate communication requires. Photography, with its capacity to “capture the real thing” with the visual rhetoric of objectivity, seemed a more logical choice. But if one wants to be logical about how and why visual communication works, then some examination of how humans see and understand what they see is necessary. Interestingly, in spite of the seemingly pragmatic nature of photography, the psychology of seeing is better reflected in the many modes of illustration. The enormously wide array of depictive modes illustrators can adopt, most of which depart in some way from visible reality, paradoxically, more closely parallels the various ways that the mind deals with the images presented to it by the eyes.

Photography is very good at capturing light, color, and detail from the real world in ways that are less mediated by the human hand. It is a visual communication mode that helps its audience identify particular people and places, and is effective in conveying a visceral sense of “being there.” However, as I will explain, identification is only a small aspect of what humans do with the vision supplied by the eyes to the brain. Categorization, the sorting of objects into broad classifications, is a visual task that the brain is more often dealing with, and one which requires substantially less detail than that found in the real world or recorded through photography.

In making meaning of what is seen, the beholder connects vision to concepts. Identification assumes there is an objective reality “out there” to be got at. However, depending on where the beholder stands in nature, some things are more identifiable than others. Distance and lighting conditions can both reduce the kind of detail associated with visual realism, even “in the wild.” In addition, the eye can never see exactly the same thing twice. The mind must, and does, have ways of rounding out these continuously varying impressions. Illustration allows for these more generalized views of things to be presented to the beholder rather than the sliver of reality captured in the snapshot. This chapter, in part, reviews literature, particularly from perceptual and cognitive science, as it applies to illustration, in order to explain how illustrations can help the beholder with the visual tasks of both identification and categorization.

In the second part of the chapter I will explore how illustration need not be a means of recording aspects of the visible world at all but may also make visible those aspects of life that are not normally apparent to the eye. In life, the visibly real, though it requires much of our mental processing powers, and though sight is often prioritized over the other senses, is not the only reality. Most sensible people would agree that economic collapse, for example, is a reality. Like the wind, however, it cannot be directly photographed. One might photograph its effects. However, the wind can be drawn in an illustration. Comics makers, for example, have conventions to hand for depicting the wind using basic visual schemas. The wind can also be personified as it has been on ancient maps. Similarly, “governments propping up corporations deemed too big to fail” cannot be photographed, but as with the words “propping up” one doesn't have to look too far inside oneself for a mental sketch to depict financial rescue measures. Making invisible aspects of life visible, based on schemas and metaphor, is one of the great strengths of illustration in addressing visual communication tasks.

Visual Tasks

To begin with the visual task of identification, I want to ponder how it is we can understand any image that is not realistic. Throughout human evolution our ancestors have been looking at the world and making sense of it through all its detail. One might reasonably expect therefore that a picture that can reproduce that detailed world faithfully would be ideal for all pictorial communication. The relatively recent invention of photography, since it allows the faithful recording of light reflecting from objects in the real world, would seem to be the best way to make these pictures. Certainly the invention of photography was greeted with a sense that here at last was a way of sharing a view of the world (Green‐Lewis 1996, p. 26). However, depending on the visual communication task required, instructional design, for example, or recognition and memory tasks, a photograph is often outperformed by other kinds of pictures. Or as Francis Dwyer, the visual literacy advocate, observed, the use of specific types of visual illustrations to facilitate specific types of objectives significantly improves achievement (Dwyer 1978, pp. 96–97). These other visual communications tasks, and the strengths of illustration modes to carry them out, will be discussed below. For now I will keep the focus on the faithful representation of the visible world.

Identification

High‐fidelity reproductions of the visible world are effective where the visual communication task is to help the beholder identify something specific. For example, environmental portraiture is a mode of photography which records a specific person in their typical, identifiable habitat. From a socio‐psychological perspective, identification of other humans is high on the list of visual tasks: “Face recognition represents a potent drive to processes underlying natural selection, since it underpins appropriate interaction with the species most central to our survival, namely other humans” (Wallis 2013). While merely broad categorization of animals, foods, tools, and other objects suffices for survival, correct within‐category discrimination is necessary for a reliable face recognition system; the relevant question is not “what is that?” (a face), but rather “who is that?” (which particular face). From the evolutionary perspective, faces may merit neural resources beyond those dedicated to other object classes (Kanwisher et al. 1997; Öhman and Mineka 2001; Tsao and Livingstone 2008).

Much of the psychology of face recognition is still debated. Newport et al. (2016) explain: “Two rival theories of how humans recognize faces exist: (i) recognition is innate, relying on specialized neocortical circuitry, and (ii) recognition is a learned expertise, relying on general object recognition pathways.” However, that same study suggests that animals without the brain module hitherto ascribed the function of face recognition (the neocortex) can be trained to recognize human faces. Wallis (2013), on the other hand, argues for a unified model of face and object recognition: “many of the known effects are actually a symptom of expertise rather than something immutably unique to faces” (Wallis 2013, p. 2). As people gain experience of the world they develop concepts regarding what is visually normal within particular classes of objects. For humans the class of objects in which most people develop the greatest level of discrimination is the face. After a time each person, depending on their experience of others, begins to develop an understanding of a mental norm or range of typical possibilities for faces.

As far as representation and illustration are concerned, it is important to focus less on the specific mental mechanisms that allow the brain to identify individuals and more on the fact that identification is a relatively narrow, albeit important, function of the visual system compared with the broader need to correctly classify other things.

If identification is the visual communication task at hand, photography certainly provides a powerful and efficient way of delivering the information required, but there are at least two caveats to this proposition. One is that even in this task photography can be bettered by one of the chirographic illustration modes, caricature. The other caveat is the problem of specificity that photography always supplies. I will deal with the first caveat first. Susan Brennan defines caricature as:

a graphical coding of facial features that seeks paradoxically to be more like a face than the face itself. It […] amplifies perceptually significant information ...