Illustration Style Quotes

I'm not a painter by any stretch of the imagination; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditional illustrator, and I begin with black and white. If I need colour, I add it over the top. There's a calligraphic element to it... it's about the texture of lines on the page.

We certainly have a lot of ideas, and we both love what Tony [Fucile] did with the book [Bink & Gollie]. If we could all pull it off, I think all three of us would like to do another.

I have a very low tolerance for animation. I'm used to the perfect integrity you get from drawing your own comics. There's something about that that animation always loses.

Theodor Geisel (otherwise known as Dr. Seuss) spent his workdays ensconced in his private studio, the walls lined with sketches and drawings, in a bell-tower outside his La Jolla, California, house. Geisel was a much more quiet man than his jocular rhymes suggest. He rarely ventured out in public to meet his young readership, fretting that kids would expect a merry, outspoken, Cat in the Hat–like figure, and would be disappointed with his reserved personality. “In mass, [children] terrify me,” he admitted.

If Gucci handbags were still in fashion Greenaway would carry his scripts in them.

There's something very strange and wrong-seeming about drawing realistic eyeballs in comics, at least in the mode of comics where action is carried more by the movement of the characters rather than where narration links disparately framed selected images.

If I open a Batman book, and he doesn't look right, I can't do it. It has so much to do with the art.

Looking back, my style was pretty much Marvel house style - very large, thick characters, very musclebound, not very flexible.

A comic book is the opposite of a cartoon. In a cartoon, you want to simplify the idea, so when they look at it at a glance, they get it. Boom. Simple. Direct to the point. But when you're drawing Groo, now it's a narrative, a story. You want the viewer to get involved in the story. You want him to feel like he's in the town to follow your main character. So I love to add lots and lots of things in it. Things that people will enjoy going back to and say, "Oh yeah, that's how a market must have looked in this fantasy world, with people selling meat here and dishes here."

I've always felt that I was a bit of an outsider to the British children's-book illustration scene, because I don't work in line and wash.

Yes, the people I draw don't have a wide variety of looks. Every now and then I'll spruce it up, like a woman will be wearing a two-piece suit as opposed to a one-piece, or a man will not be wearing a tie; he'll just have a collar.

Each book requires a different look. Sometimes I get to take a personal direction that's appropriate for the story. I try to push things within a range. Some are rougher, some more expressionistic, some are slicker graphically and call for a prettier drawing style that I can do. Some have a more classical vibe, and some are in between.

I have a strong say in how my books are marketed, and the covers - I am very firm that I don't want pink and fluffy, or stick figures sitting drinking cocktails. That's simply not appealing to me.

My great influence has been Maurice Sendak, who drew 'Where the Wild Things Are.' His characters really interact with each other.

I'm very much influenced by your traditional comic book artists like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth and Walter Simonson. Their styles were sort of what I was gravitating towards.

I am quite convinced now... that the actual training of drawing cartoons - which is, of course, my style - led to my producing Spot. Cartoons must be very simple and have as few words as possible, and so, too, must the 'Spot' books.

The detail of my art depends entirely on the project itself. I tend to be a little more detail-oriented with covers than I am with interior pages, and I try to reduce the detail on action sequences as opposed to suspense passages.

The generic Canadian style of illustration is different from the generic American style.