Combine the Hyperreal and 3D graphics styles to provide useful technical info as in some of the samples. The 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 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 made up of many photos jigsawed together to form a completely new picture. But here, the aim is more to depict a completely new scene or 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.
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.
Flat comprises flat shapes forming a picture. It’s a little like Paper Shapes without a third dimension.
(UPDATE 2016: Flat 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 to name only a few.
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.
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.
Softline 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.
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.
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.