What Makes A Good Illustration?

By Alan Spink - July 10, 2022

Illustration by Sailesh Thakrar.

Every “Friend” short story and serial needs to be accompanied by a striking illustration. On our website, there’s an informative behind the scenes blog post from Illustrations Editor Manon.

For the purpose of this post, I want to highlight the illustrating process from an editorial point of view.

Short stories

After reading a short story, we have a few ways of finding suitable illustrations. We can either access our own picture library of illustrations, or access the online agency where we source the likes of vector art and photographs.

Vector illustration by Sarah Holliday.

The other option is to type up an illustration brief. This involves highlighting the main character(s) alongside a specific scene. We will also highlight a specific “mood” we want captured within the scene and, if relevant, the season.

It’s important not to give the ending away in an illustration though. For example, characters who are single at the start of a story but end up as a couple at the end. We can still show them together, but not in an obviously romantic way.

Serials

For serials, we rely solely on illustration briefs. The reason being, there will be recurring characters who will feature in multiple scenes.

The characters have to be suitably attired each time. Unless it’s a particular vocation, the readers don’t want to see characters wearing the same clothes all the way through a serial.

Though serials can contain a multitude of characters, we prefer to show the main characters in the majority of scenes.

Unlike short stories, where we can simply show a landscape to capture the “heartbeat” of a story, we will always show a minimum of two characters in each serial scene. For the simple reason, serials are more character focussed than in short stories.