Different genres and types of illustration that you can find

As with graphic design, illustration is a very broad field and it has many branches of specialization. Illustration is mainly differentiated from other art disciplines because of the communicative intent of the pieces, and this is something that also gives way to a sub specialization in different genres. Today we will learn a bit more about the different types of illustration that there are!

Children book illustration 

Children book illustrators create illustrations that are aimed towards a young audience, most of which feature a bright color palette, to represent scenes easy to understand. This type of illustration is really clear and you can guess what is happening to the characters rather easily.

Narrative illustration

This is the kind of illustration used to represent the contents of a text, not necessarily aimed towards a young public. According to the text, the illustration will represent the words in a more realistic or abstract way, depending on the intention of the author and the illustrator (which can sometimes be the same person!).

Comic

Comics follow a script, and develop the action of a story in a number of limited panels. This task requires many skills, most of them related to being able to tell stories through images. The author of the script and the artist team up to visually represent the action, although some comic authors write their own stories.

Humor

Some illustrators are dedicated to creating graphic humor pieces, which tend to be ingenious and easy to understand for the audience that they are aimed at. They can be single panels, or multiple ones (a very popular choice is the 4-panel form that appears in many web comics).

Editorial illustration

Editorial illustration is about creating illustrations for magazines, newspapers and publications, which help to engage the readers into the content. Sometimes they literally represent the text, and other times they are more metaphorical.

Illustration in advertising 

This type of illustration has to be able to convey a message and attract potential clients with the use of color and visual elements.

Fashion illustration 

These images are used in fashion campaigns and design, the bodies are commonly more elongated than usual and they feature the clothes of a certain brand, designer, etc.

There are many more types, but these are some of the most commonly found! If you are looking for some illustrations to download, just head over to Freepik to find more! 🙂