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Illustration: The Art of Depicting a Story

September 01, 2024

Illustration: The Art of Depicting a Story

Chris Techentin,  Jack and the Beanstalk, digital illustration, 2013, 2013.96.1.
Rachelle G. Wunderink, Anatomy: Organs, pen on paper, 2015, 2018.13.2.
Amanda Allietta, I Forgot the Candles, digital illustration, 2008, 2008.206.1.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Plaiser a Paris: Les Restaraunts et les Cafes, print, 1893, 2008.487.141ab.
Allyson Haller, Virgin on the Rocks, digital collage, 2004, 2004.460.1.
The Best People of St. Petersburg, Olga Florenskaya, color silkscreen, 2005, 2006.551.1.

 

What do an Ikea cabinet instruction manual, a Grey’s Anatomy medical textbook, and a movie poster for the latest upcoming flick all have in common?

While they all may be things you can find on GVSU’s Allendale campus - these items also have a form of illustration to them. Everywhere you look, illustration is part of our daily lives. Brand logos, book covers, movie posters, billboards, comic books, children’s books, graphic novels, and even ramen noodle packages all include artwork that illustrates a story.

While the graphic novel sitting on top of your Ikea nightstand and the instructional manual you used to build it might not seem similar at first, both include images that tell a story. The manual tells the story of how to build the nightstand, while the graphic novel uses images to narrate a story.

Many artists are also illustrators, using the images they create to tell a narrative. Sometimes, like the illustrator of a medical textbook, the images are fact-driven, while other artists’ images leave the story up to the viewer’s imagination. Illustrations can be created in a variety of mediums, from digital drawings and paper collages to paintings, drawings, and prints.

In partnership with GVSU’s very own Laker Con, a three-day comics convention celebrating comics literacy and the scholarly merits of sequential storytelling, the GVSU Art Gallery is also celebrating the visual art of storytelling this month.

Explore the various forms of illustration that can be found in the GVSU Art Gallery Collection.

https://artgallery.gvsu.edu/Browse/objects/facet/term_facet/id/14141

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Page last modified September 1, 2024