Illustration is a skill of visual communication. The combination of great artwork and wisely chosen
ideas is the formula for an illustrator's success in communicating with pictures.
Pictures play a very important part in our everyday life. Sight is our most widely used sense and as a
consequence of this, pictures play a significant role in communication. A picture is neither subtle nor
universal enough to take the place of words in the strictest sense of the meaning, but that does not
mean that pictures do not have their role in communication, and many pictures do a superior job to
words under certain conditions. The underlying problem is that to fulfil this condition, the pictures rely
on the diversity of language and words to secure their meaning.
Gombrich, in his book Art and Illusion highlighted the biggest problem of communicating with
pictures, and that is their inaccuracy. His claim is that the artist is psychologically susceptible to his
own interpretation of the object he depicts. He sees where the lines are to be drawn and he makes
the object conform to his own imagined stereotype. An artist learns a schemata and a set of patterns
when he learns to draw and these will always, in the first instance, direct him to draw to those
particular patterns and classifications. As Gombrich says, the `will-to- form' is rather a `will-to-
conform', and ensure that the assimilation of any new shape conforms to the schemata and patterns
an artist has learned to handle. The truth is twisted to fit the stereotype and the outcome is not always
the accurate representation of the object. With this being the case, it is hard to argue that pictures
can accurately replace words. Words are specifically designed to convey accurate descriptions and
meanings, whereas pictures are subjective and their accuracy is always at the mercy of the
interpreter.
Pictures are also only useful as a reminder of a frozen moment in time. A photograph of someone is
very quickly out of date, whereas language changes to suit time. A name can quite easily flash a
better and more accurate image of the subject in the recipients mind, whereas a picture does no
such thing. The importance of language is that it is communicable. Naming someone provokes a
better image than an old photograph does and is just as instantaneous. The key to language lies in
its wonderful subtlety and diversity. Picture communication can never say as much. Language is
designed specifically with the purpose of communicating, whereas pictures are not. It is only
because of spoken and written words, that man has progressed. Speech can be wonderfully
diverse, but at the same time, its effectiveness lies in its economical use. This economy is
particularly compact in poetry. Through language we can form relationships and communicate in
other forms.
According to this argument, picture-making evolved after language because it needed a spoken
vocabulary to find a purpose in communication.
Thoughts without a language are not truly thoughts, because they need language to define
themselves. Blind Helen Keller in her autobiography remarked upon this, when she first realised the
significance of language. When one day the word `water' was spelt out in her hand, while at the same
time a cool stream was gushing over her other hand, the world of language was opened up to her.
"...Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten -a thrill of returning thought;
and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me...That living word awakened my
soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!...Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a
new thought."
It is easy to forget the significance of language. Real thinking, is only possible when we have the
language there to convey it. `Water' for Helen Keller was no longer just an object of sense perception;
it had a name that could be mentioned, conceived, remembered.
Pictures only offer confusion unless they are qualified by language. To be able to communicate
effectively the meaning of the picture, you have to place it in context. Whether this be a phrase on the
picture saying; `danger', `vote Labour', or `
support Manchester United', or just putting the picture in
a particular place or time, or next to the article that makes it relevant. We have passport photos and
not written descriptions because it is a better form of communication under the circumstances.
Pictures add sparkle and colour to our life, but their use is entirely dependent on language.
The joy and necessity of language was wonderfully captured by Helen Keller who could not see, and
just as the world would be a more insipid place without pictures it would be even more so without
language. The creativity of words in poetry, novels and public speaking is sometimes harder, and
less exciting to reflect in pictures. This is the problem of
book illustrators, who produce a highly
personal view of what the works generate in their imagination.
Pictures have their place, they can convey messages quicker and make life easier and more
exciting, but they are ultimately dependent on the social conditions created through language.
The Greeks copied the innovative Phoenician alphabet because pictograms and ideograms were
limited in what they could represent. It is said that their famous historian, Herodotus, recorded a
disastrous event that came from misinterpreting pictograms. A general received a scroll with pictures
of a bird, a frog, and several arrows on it. The pictures intrigued him, but he was too proud to admit
that he couldn't figure out what the message meant. He studied the scroll all night. In the morning, the
general told his officers that the scroll meant the enemy was surrendering to them! The officers
patted themselves on the back and congratulated each other on their victory. However, the poor,
sleep- deprived general had made a deadly mistake. The pictures meant that the enemy would
attack them and that they should prepare to surrender! The Greeks learned the lesson that
communicating with pictures was unreliable. They needed a better system.
Cave paintings and representational carvings define the beginnings of "external long- term storage"
of information. External storage has several qualities of interest.
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It can be used by the individual as an extension of "working memory" for immediate use in
thinking.
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It provides long-term storage, for retrieval at a later date.
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It can be used to communicate to other individuals.
Before children learn to read and write, they do not know the difference between a line drawing and a
letter. When an adult writes an 'A,' it is simply another drawing. It is a picture, different than a face or
a house, but it is still just another image drawn with a coloured pencil on white paper. Soon children
learn that combinations of these letter-pictures mean more complicated things. When the drawings
'A-P-P-L- E' are combined, they form another picture, which we learn, stands for the name of the fruit.
Now the letter-pictures become word-pictures that can spark other images in our minds of the thing
they stand for. We further learn that these word- pictures can be combined with other word-pictures to
form sentence- pictures. To a child, there is no difference between words and pictures -- they are one
and the same.
It is not clear how much thinking skills are helped by early drawing, or how much knowledge is
conveyed. Communicating via pictures is potentially powerful, but would have been laborious with
early materials, and not very portable. However, it seems likely that early drawing, combined with the
communications abilities refined through use of speech, must have played a role in the development
of early pictorial written languages.
When you carefully analyse a visual message, you consciously study each visual symbol within that
picture's frame. The act of concentration is a verbal exercise. Without verbal translations of the signs
within an image, there is little chance of it being recalled in the future. The picture is lost from your
memory because you have learned nothing from it. Images become real property of the mind and
remembered only when language expresses them. Linguistic experts do not need to argue that
images have no alphabet or syntax because such assertions are true. The alphabet and the syntax of
images reside in the mind, not in the picture itself.
But then the syntax of words can also reside in the mind and not in the word. For example, the words
- square, circle, a hundred, etc convey to the mind notions so complete in themselves, and so distinct
from everything else, that we are sure when we use them we know the whole of our own meaning. It is
widely different with words expressing natural objects and mixed relations.
Take, for instance, IRON. Different persons attach very different ideas to this word. One who has
never heard of magnetism has a widely different notion of IRON from one in the contrary
predicament. Most people regard this metal as incombustible. A chemist sees it burn with the
utmost fury, and has other reasons for regarding it as one of the most combustible bodies in nature.
A poet uses it as an emblem of rigidity. The smith and the engineer mould it like wax into every
form. The jailer prizes it as an obstruction. The electrician sees in it as a conductor.
The meaning of such a word is like a rainbow - everybody sees a different one, and all maintain it to
be the same.
There are strong indications that the status of images in mass communication is increasing. We live
in a mediated blitz of images. They fill our newspapers, magazines, books, clothing, billboards,
computer monitors and television screens as never before in the history of mass communications.
We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, understanding of the world is being
accomplished, not through reading words, but by reading images. Philosopher Hanno Hardt warns
that the television culture is replacing words as the important factor in social communication. Shortly,
words will be reserved for only bureaucratic transactions through business forms and in books that
will only be read by a few individuals. On the human law of 'minimum effort', reading is losing ground
to watching because viewing requires little mental processing.
