Common Mistakes Made By Picture Book illustrators

The goal of picture-book illustration is to tell a storey. We've all heard the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words." The question is, what storey will your illustration tell in a thousand words? Will you repeat the storey that the text has already told? Will you add your own storey components to deepen the meaning? Yes and no, to varied degrees, are the answers to these questions. Illustration for children's books is a sophisticated and complicated art form filled with responsibilities to the author and readers, as well as perils for the illustrator. This article examines four ways an illustrator can deviate off the path, as well as four strategies for staying on track.

Mistake 1: Illustration that repeats the text

Drawing an illustration that replicates what the text is saying is a typical error for an early-career illustrator. If the text reads someone is smiling while lifting a spoon to their mouth (a regular picture-book writing error! ), the illustration mistake would be to portray the person smiling while lifting a spoon to their mouth. If the text says someone'says' something, the illustrator makes the error of drawing the character with their mouth open as if speaking and/or making a hand gesture as if uttering the words.

The illustration is frozen in time when it is done literally. It prevents viewers from engaging with the storey, pondering its significance, casting their minds back to a previously imagined moment, or anticipating what might happen next. In illustration, literal interpretation is drawing a schematic rather than telling a tale.

Literal illustration also takes up valuable picture-book real estate. In roughly 14 double-page images, picture books must convey a theme, reveal a plot, and embody character. Because the basic texts and limited space have a heavy narrative load, repeating what has already been succinctly condensed in language in the image is a waste of every kind of resource (including print and paper costs). Rather just repeating the storey, add to it.

Mistake 2: Illustration that adds too much narrative

Another common illustration mistake is striving to pack too much information into the illustrations. Filling the image with detail isn’t a bad thing, but doing so has inherent pitfalls. An illustrator can become side-tracked by details, and then by details of details, and might then become derailed by building in a mini-narrative to explain the details of those details. The next thing you know, a page has been inadvertently filled with nonessential visual information that has little to do with the story, muddies the theme, distracts the reader and disrespects the author’s intention. 

How do you know if you have illustrated a step too far? An excellent rule of thumb is to ask yourself exactly how each detail highlights the theme and emotion of that moment in the story. Your answer to yourself must be brief and simple. If you come up with a long and complex answer by way of twists and turns and a whole new story, you have probably overstepped. For example, interesting piles of kitchen clutter in a story about a busy person can help to underscore a theme of ‘what happens when we spread ourselves too thin’. But a cat marching across the picture with a suitcase and an entourage of lizards may be more of a distraction, unless the theme is ‘when we spread ourselves too thin, we start to lose touch with reality’. 

Overall, respect the author’s intention and add anything that highlights, enhances, expands and illuminates that intention. The full extent of your imagination is the limit … but within limits. 

Mistake 3: Illustration that is too conceptual

How much concept is too much concept in a picture-book illustration? A certain amount of concept is needed for an illustration to make sense. Without concept an illustration would tend toward pure abstraction (which can also work, if done right). But too much focus on concept can distort meaning by turning a united whole into a list of parts, and when an illustration becomes a list of parts it might as well be text. 

The ideal illustration has an overall ‘wham’ effect on the reader. An effective illustration makes full use of the principles and elements of design, and manipulates composition to shepherd the reader’s emotional responses along the narrative arc. The role of illustration is primarily for subconscious and preconscious emotional effect, and secondarily of concept. 

TIP #3: avoid over-conceptualising 

Mistake 4: Illustration that doesn’t ‘work to the brief’ (or not being a team player) 

The day-to-day reality of working as a picture-book illustrator can seem lonesome and isolated, but it also involves working with a team. Illustrating picture books means following the author’s lead as well as adding your own vision. It entails following the instructions of an editor, art director and book designer. To manage this range of input while retaining originality means an illustrator needs to be resilient. She needs to be both a team player and an individual operator. 

The pitfall of having a strong individual approach is to topple from originality to wilfulness. Originality entails a fresh way of looking at a familiar thing. Wilfulness can end up by creating something inconsequential. An editor may decide a story needs sombre illustrations to convey the seriousness of an issue. The illustrator, on the other hand, having illustrated page after page of sombreness, may introduce a small clown or two at the crisis point, just to lighten things up. Or the illustrator may have a signature frog she insists on including in every image, against the sage advice of an editor and the wishes of the author. The frog may be witty and even ravishingly beautiful, but the reader will soon learn to look for the frog rather than follow the emotional flow of the story. In neither case is reader’s needs being respectfully served. 

I have found that the best illustrators are able to take on an instruction, incorporate it and then extend it. They know how to let go, pivot and move on, no matter what stage of the process they are at. They know how to create something bigger and better and fresher than the original instruction, but without deviating from it. Their revised work adheres to and moves beyond the brief, it is in line with the theme, the emotion of the story and with the author’s intention, even while it moves further and beyond anything the author and editor combined could have imagined. An illustrator who manages this combination of community- and individual-mindedness throughout the illustration process is an illustrator who will continue to be offered work.