American Illustration Style —— Why are there so many differences between foreign illustration styles and domestic ones?

Rockwell Kent is an outstanding illustrator in the 20th century in the United States. He once painted more than 300 illustrations for his masterpiece Moby Dick, which made Seward, the owner of Random House, especially appreciate Rockwell Kent. When the first edition of Moby Dick was published, Rockwell Kent's name was printed on the cover. The original author McWeill was not printed, which is an anecdote in the publishing legend!

Rockwell Kent was born in 1882, a small town in upstate New York, USA. He graduated from Columbia architecture department. There are many details of architectural art paintings in his later illustrations, whether it is pavilions, temples or portraits of classical novels, there is a three-dimensional sense of sculpture!

Rockwell is good at drawing illustrations for famous books. Kent is also the most famous American illustrator in the heyday of American book publishing industry in the 20th century. He went in and out of publishing, journalism and business giants. He is generous and sociable, and designed home library tickets for these celebrities. The design cost of an ordinary public library ticket is between one hundred dollars and two hundred dollars. Is a new generation of successful professional printmakers and library ticket design experts!

He is well-dressed, in and out of high society, can sell his own paintings and run his own life, which fully embodies the characteristics of American life. Kent is quite versatile in painting. He is good at oil painting, watercolor painting, sculpture, decorative painting, woodcut, board painting and copperplate printing. He is a great artist with great talent!

Illustrations of Kent's famous works include (Moby Dick), Chaucer's (Canterbury Tales), Goethe's (Faust) (The Complete Works of decameron Shakespeare), Whitman's (Leaves of Grass), Random House's logo and Voltaire's (Honest) illustrations drawn by Kent!

This is Kent's illustration for The Canterbury Tales. Kent's illustrations are very personal, with black and white lines, a sense of humor, and a slightly exaggerated artistic realism of the characters! The style of the work is obviously different from the description of the characters' scenery in the novel by European illustrators. After getting familiar with it, you will have the taste of standard American culturalism in the early twentieth century!

Rockwell Kent died in 197 1, a great painter with a long life! Married three ladies. The third wife in her later years was not much older than her children and was very popular with painters. Just like Zhang Daqian in our country, he left several old ladies in the mainland and took his little wife to Taiwan Province Province and Brazil in his later years!

Rockwell Kent painted, wrote, sailed, explored, traveled around the world, fell in love and had an affair. .....

(The picture is taken from the Library of Rational Professional Writers.)

Who can tell me something about illustrations? As a form of visual art, CG illustration has its own aesthetic characteristics. Among them, the most obvious ones are as follows:

Purpose and restrictive factors

Second, practicality and popularity.

Third, visualization and intuition.

Fourth, aesthetics and interest.

Creativity and artistic imagination

6. Diversification and diversification

Due to the diversity of media, content, expression and appeal object, the aesthetic standards of modern illustration are also diversified and diversified. explain

[Edit this paragraph] The form of illustrations

There are many forms of modern illustration, which can be classified by media or function. According to the classification of media, it is basically divided into two parts, namely print media and film and television media. Print media includes poster advertisement illustration, newspaper illustration, magazine book illustration, product packaging illustration, corporate image publicity material illustration, etc. Film and television media include movies, television and computer screens.

Poster advertising illustration: also known as poster, poster. In the era when advertisements mainly rely on printed media to transmit information, they can be said to be in a dominant position in advertisements. However, with the emergence of film and television media, its application scope has narrowed.

Newspaper illustration: Newspaper is one of the best media for information transmission. It is the most popular, low cost, large circulation, wide spread, fast speed and short production cycle.

Illustration of magazine books: including the design of front cover and back cover and the illustration of words, which are widely used in all kinds of books. Such as literature books, children's books, science and technology books, etc. This kind of illustration is gradually declining. In the future, it will still exist in a large number of electronic books and newspapers.

Product packaging illustration: product packaging makes illustration more widely used. Product packaging design includes three elements: logo, graphics and text. It has two missions: one is to introduce products, and the other is to establish brand image. The most prominent feature is that it is between plane and three-dimensional design.

Illustration of corporate image publicity materials: it is the VI design of enterprises. It is included in the basic system and application system of corporate image design.

Film and television illustration in film and television media: point out the illustrations in movies and TV now. Generally, it appears in advertisements. Movie and TV illustrations also include computer screens. Now the computer screen has become the performance space of commercial illustration, and many graphic library animations, game programs and graphic tables have become a member of commercial illustration.

The form of illustration

Numbers, free form, realistic technology, black and white, color, using materials, photos and computer generation ... as long as they are "graphics", they can all be applied to the production of illustrations.

vector

Classification of illustrations

According to the current market positioning: vector fashion comics, young realism, the concept of illustration in Victoria, the United States and South Korea, etc.

Classification by production methods: hand-drawn, vector, commercial, cutting-edge (2D plane, UI design, 3D), pixel.

According to the illustration style, it is divided into Japanese cartoon illustration, European and American illustration, Hong Kong illustration, Korean game illustration, and Taiwan Province romance novel cover illustration. Because there are so many styles now, I just classify them simply.

In addition, there are many foreign styles, such as hand-folded paper, cloth pattern and various styles, which are neck and neck.

Illustration status quo

The most developed place of illustration: the United States is a country with a very developed illustration market, and appreciating illustrations has become a habit of society. On the one hand, a large number of independent illustration products are sold in the terminal market, such as illustration books, magazines, illustration greeting cards and so on. On the other hand, illustration, as a part of visual communication system (graphic design, illustration, commercial photography), is widely used in graphic advertisements, posters, covers and other design contents. The illustration market in the United States is also very specialized, which is divided into children, sports, science fiction, food, digital, pure artistic style, humor and other professional types, and each type has a special illustrator. The whole illustration market is very standardized and the competition is fierce, because the average income level of illustrators is three times that of ordinary Americans.

Illustrations in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan: As we all know, Japanese commercial animation has a huge market and operation team. Animation is an important branch of illustration industry. Before CG technology (ComputerGraphics) entered the field of illustration, hand-drawn animation had become a sunrise industry in Japan. Today's younger generation is more and more inclined to use computer digital technology.

In South Korea, with the game industry climbing to the second pillar industry of the national economy in recent years, illustrations, especially digital illustrations, have sprung up everywhere, and the game characters designed with digital illustrations have also won more market space with the popularity of Korean games in China.

At the same time, Hong Kong and Taiwan illustrators are still looking for their own way of industry, although their works have obvious traces of learning from Japan. Illustration education: Beijing Institute of Printing, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, Beijing Broadcasting Institute, Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts, Central Academy of Fine Arts and other institutions have set up illustrations or related majors in the past two years, but the teaching content often only includes publication illustrations rather than commercial illustrations in a complete sense.

But in foreign countries, the combination of illustration education and market is very close. Many well-known illustrators are visiting teachers in various universities, and they have brought the most fashionable and cutting-edge business consciousness to the school. Nowadays, commercial illustrations popular in foreign markets include publication illustrations, cartoon mascots, video and game art designs and advertising illustrations. In fact, in China, illustrations have spread all over print and electronic media, commercial places, public institutions, commodity packaging, film and television performance posters, corporate advertisements and even T-shirts, diaries and New Year cards.

Illustrators can use PHOTOSHOP and PAINTER to draw bitmap illustrations, also can use SAI (Japanese software) to draw, and can also use CORELDRAW and ILLUXXXXXX (English name: forgotten = _ =) to draw vector illustrations, so it is essential to make CG illustrations with graphic flat plates. Moreover, the performance of the host is better, and CG animation has higher requirements for computers.

CG animation is mainly done by MAYA. Many other auxiliary software plug-ins will be used in animation abroad. But it is also good to learn Maya well. A Maya is enough for you to learn for several years. = _ =

Learning CG is a bit backward. There are many CG tutorials now, and you can learn faster by watching video tutorials.

Why are the styles of illustrations abroad so different from those in China? Due to cultural differences, China lags behind a lot in its development, so the Japanese painting style learned in the later period is superhero style in the United States, which is difficult to express in some places, so there is an abstract painting style.