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24 Styles

24 Styles are here for you to give your ideas an identity, much as voices or clothes do.

24 Styles are two dozen ways to say whatever you want.
You can also combine these ‘voices’ to express your concept more precisely. 

Among the 24 Styles, unique to me are the Legend and the Fotomelt styles. Each style brings its mood. So the right combination needs some thought. I’d be glad to talk this over with you. Links above the slideshow lead to more samples* in the selected style.

*That is when I’ve done those pages… If you can see this sentence, I’m still web-weaving. Some styles are now available: see links in green, below.

FUN

 

When the meaning is obvious and we can play a little, these fun styles can be a welcome change from the ‘normal’ illustrations.

 

Grobby is versatile for emotion and humour, especially for young adults. Younger readers may think another child drew it. Well. Not wrong, really.

Icing style can evoke traditional African embroidery as an alternative to the Legend style. Or it can resemble actual icing.

Paper is graphic and elegant, good for simple concepts and perk up dry or earnest material. And it can do that without being flippant.

Stylised covers a lot of ground. Here are the styles that fit nowhere else. It’s a broad, but recognisable label.

REALISTIC

 

Combine Airbrush and 3D graphics for technical info as in some of the samples. The end result is clearer than a photo.  Use them together or singly, to entertain, explain, or promote.

Collage comprises pictures from creative commons sites or my own photos. It conveys mood well, in poems and stories for language studies in schoolbooks.

The last style in this family is Fotomelt. Like Collage, it’s composed of many photos jigsawed together to form a completely new picture but here the aim is more to depict an actual situation than to convey a mood.  

Fotomelt
illustrates stories using imagery that newly literate people can ‘read’ easily, with more info than simple flat colours can give. One also often captures detail important to indigenous people, that the artist may be unaware of. Finally, the image is pulled together with a decorative, painterly effect.

HYPERREAL | 3D GRAPHICS | COLLAGE  | FOTOMELT

PENCILS

‘Hand drawn styles’ are great for pictures that tell a story or convey information. If there’s some leeway for a bit of artistry, versatile pencils add interest.

Pencil & Colour is great for the more serious, real-life stories with a bit of drama.

Pure Pencil  is good to use for monochrome books with cheaper paper due to budget constraints. But fine pen lines (Simple Style under MINIMALIST) also work.

Pencil Crayon: always popular, and if necessary, can be bolstered with a thin pen line for impact.

Tinted Strokes is a fun way to add a new, contemporary dimension to plain pencil drawings. 

PENCIL & COLOR | PENCIL CRAYON | PURE PENCIL | TINTED 

GRAPHIC


Cutout
(aka the Flat Style) comprises flat shapes forming a picture. It’s a little like Paper Shapes without a third dimension.
(UPDATE 2016: Cutout got texture!)

Icon has thick coloured outlines and is great for, well… icons. But not only icons! Good for mascot characters too.

Legend has heavy outlines too, but they are black, like the work of the Ndebele people, Australian Aboriginal, Maori and Native American art.

Scraperboard has a similar indigenous African feel to Legend, with more texture within the shapes themselves. Both convey an ethnic art feeling, with as much or as little detail as the story needs, and sometimes these two styles blend.

CUTOUT  |  ICON |  LEGEND  |  SCRAPERBOARD

EXPRESSIVE

Lines that convey more than just the outline or shape of something, that add a sense of light and shadow, and energy: these are my expressive styles.

Squishy Hard often combines with Scribbly or even just adds some dimension and interest to Simple Line. Squishy isn’t fussy. Good for communicating in a relaxed or serious way and very versatile. A squishy line changes from thin to thick. 

Squishy Soft is more decorative, and can become quite sentimental on occasion.

Scribbly is self-explanatory. It can indicate texture, provide an interesting alternative to cross-hatching when shading and generally makes itself useful. 

Chinese is of course the president of squishy. I will say no more, except that it nearly landed with the minimals because there’s usually no background. But it got all squishy and emotional so here we are.

SCRIBBLY | SQUISHY HARD | SQUISHY SOFT | CHINESE

MINIMALIST

The ‘clean styles’, these are my four minimalist styles where it’s mainly about the line.

Zen Japanese is a decorative style, leaning heavily on Japanese drawings and the peace they evoke. The subject doesn’t always need to be Japanese; it’s useful for Art Deco drawings too. It is usually a line of uniform thickness.

Simple Line
just explains it clearly with no fuss. Good for ‘how-to’ illustrations. Here too, the hand needs to be steady. It differs from Technical in that there is little dependence on the computer, except for the straight lines. I produce a patient and serene mood for these, by listening to gripping stories. The Simple Line is the most difficult…

Technical
is as perfect as human hand plus machine can produce. My sister once observed that when perfection is possible, perfection is expected. The machines are beautiful… 

Zen Zany is distorted and funky, but not as extreme as Grobby. This style is fun but it takes itself very seriously. Lines can not wobble, deviate or be diverted from delivering the funny.

ZEN JAPANESE  |  SIMPLE LINE  |  TECHNICAL  |  ZEN ZANY