Language

I keep asking myself questions. What is an illustration? To that question, I answer a drawing that tells something. What is a drawing? An image created by a human being using some instrument and represented on some medium.

What is an image? If I ask myself that question, I'd say it's a set of colored shapes. That set can be concrete or abstract. The concrete would be composed of shapes recognizable to the reader of the image. The abstract does not. I'm going to focus on the images that give us concrete information.

This is where the difference between a drawing and an illustration comes in. A drawing would be a representation of something with no information other than that representation. For example, if we draw a picture of a house, the drawing is a common name: house. If a drawing tells us something else, we could call it an illustration, since the representation would not be the information itself. For example, if we draw a man with a match, the message would be: Lord, hold a lighted match. We're no longer just talking about a name. We also have an action, which would be equivalent to a verb. And we also have one add-on that provides us with information. This is a complete prayer. Upon seeing this image, the viewer is going to react to that information. You will have doubts and you will probably lack information to complete the situation. If we put the house and the character together in the same image with the match, we are telling a part of a story. The reader of the image has more data. If we accompany that image with more information or put it in context, we will have a complete story told from a creator to a viewer through the image.

The moment we give illustration the ability to tell something, we are recognizing it as language.

To me, a concrete image, it seems to me that it is a language similar to writing, and an abstract image, it seems to me that it creates a language that is more similar to music.