Illustration Inside

Illustrations are mostly used in children’s books. This is because children are always fond of going through the colorful pages and enjoying the stories with the illustrations. Cartoon illustrations provide new faces to the characters in a story and the happiness that the little ones feel when their favorite characters are given shape and life cannot be merely mentioned by words.

Children are also impatient in reading stories. They love to go through the story in a quick glance when it is provided in the form of illustrations. Any author with the need for publishing children’s books and magazines consider the illustrator as the backbone for the success of their works. Therefore, it is important to get the right illustrator capable of grabbing quick attention of children and keeping them immersed in their illustrations without boring or annoying them. Some publishers ask their authors only to get the contents or manuscript of the stories or articles to be done with perfection and not to illustrate their writings. This may be because they wish to keep a good illustrator who can complement the writing with accurate illustrations. But some others allow the authors to create illustrations for their own works. Most of the authors are skilled at creating targeted illustrations for their work. And if they are not that talented to create illustrations, but does magic in attracting children with their writings, the publishers are forced to hire good illustrators to help them out in their work.

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This is the fourth in a series of articles on how to choose a children’s book. Last time, I talked about how to choose books with themes that will appeal to children. In this article I will discuss the place of a book’s illustrations in making it appealing to a child, and I will try to give some guidance on what to look for in children’s book illustrations. However, I should say up front that there is a lot of room for difference of opinion over what makes for attractive book illustrations, so take my guidance as applying only “for the most part”; there will be many exceptions to it, due to a certain amount of subjectivity inherent in any aesthetic judgments.

My central point: The illustrations of a book are perhaps the largest part of what makes a book attractive to kids, especially for children younger than eight years old. In fact, recently when I was re-reading Hi, Cat! in preparation for writing an author spotlight on Ezra Jack Keats, the images of mint green ice cream on Archie’s dark face, and of Peter’s dog Willie licking the ice cream off, jumped out as vivid memories from my own childhood. My parents had read the book to me when I was little and I still remember the images over 30 years later! I’ve had similar experiences while reading Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen to my children. The point is that attractive illustrations are almost always what focuses a young child’s interest and attention on a book-often in surprisingly enduring ways! Without strong illustrations young children may well lose interest in a book, even if the story is great.

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