Favourite Illustration Books
An Illustrated Life
Anthologies and collections are always excellent for showing the huge variety in the ways illustrators visually describe things. A lot of this happens online now, and while sites like Creative Boom provide a snapshot of current trends, books (like anything by Angus Hyland or Julius Wiedemann) tend to enshrine the most influential and enduring work over a given time.
‘An Illustrated Life’ by Danny Gregory focuses on sketchbook work. It shows what goes on behind closed doors when it’s just the illustrator and their pencils, reacting to their surroundings without the pressure or restrictions of a client’s brief.
Movement and Form: The Youssef Syllabus
What your art teacher told you is true – observational drawing is the root of everything. Not everyone wants or needs to draw in a photorealistic way, but being able to understand and dissect what you’re looking at is never going to stop being a key skill. You can find a billion different styles with a quick Google search, but ultimately style is just the shorthand that results from your observation.
Books that focus on the process of understanding and drawing complex objects are harder to come by, but something like ‘Movement and Form: The Youssef Syllabus’ by Samantha Youssef is a good place to start. This book is ridiculously comprehensive, using the human body to cover gesture, anatomy, mass, balance, gravity… It’s very much like having a life drawing teacher in the room with you!
The Art of How to Train Your Dragon (How to Train Your Dragon Film) & The Art of the Boxtrolls
My third recommendation is the wild card in the group – concept art books for movies. Many of the films you see will have their own deliberate visual language that sets the tone and atmosphere for every single scene, and several artists working on it to explore and pin down that language. We’re looking at colour schemes to portray emotion! Using layout to show relationship dynamics! Storyboards, where still images are inexplicably able to communicate speed and movement! Costume practicalities! Showing culture through props! It’s heaven.
You get to see the designs that made it into the final movie but crucially also the ones that didn’t. You can follow the thought processes of the artists as they justify one design over another, and this is where just doodling crosses over into illustration and design. Not just “what should it look like?” but “why should it look like that?”
Unsurprisingly fantasy, sci-fi, and animated films often take the biscuit in this category. ‘The Art of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones’ is very good (unlike the film itself!) as are the recent Pixar movie artbooks, and Guillermo Del Toro’s notebooks are both fascinating and creepy, but my current favourites are from the Dreamworks animated films ‘How to Train your Dragon’ and Laika’s ‘The Boxtrolls’. There are some fantastically inventive designs for two very different worlds that give both films their surprising sense of drama and emotional weight.