Illustrator Quotes

I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration - since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business - he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once. ~ Alex Raymond

A newspaper publisher. In the late 1800s the United States and Spain were warming up for a war over Cuba, and Hearst sent an illustrator to Cuba to make pictures of the event. When the illustrator got there, he sent a telegram to Hearst saying that as far as he could see, there was no war coming and that he was going home. Hearst sent back that he should stay and said, 'You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war.' And he did. ~ John Scalzi

For me, the perfect film has no dialogue at all. It's purely a visual, emotional, visceral kind of experience. And I think one can create wonderful depth and meaning and communication without using words. I started out as an illustrator and a cartoonist and caricature artist, so for me the visual is primary. ~ Bill Plympton

Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings ... pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives. But the art establishment branded him an 'illustrator', a sentimental one at that. Real artists, they said were doing art for art's sake, not for the sake of the bourgeois public. Real artists were putting swiggles, smears or daubs of paint on the canvas. They were doing 'innovative' and 'creative' work. If they were hideous and grotesque; we know that's what life really is! ~ Bill Bonner

The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time. ~ Kenneth Clark

~Reading a book is like looking through a window! ~ Zetta Hupf

My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too. ~ Natalie Babbitt

Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time - very inspiring and dramatic. ~ Bat For Lashes

I wanted to become an illustrator as a child. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures. ~ Chris Ware

Back at two o'clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo's girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I think the two jobs I dreamed of doing as a teenager were comic book artist and record cover illustrator. Maybe film director was in the mix as well, but that seemed to be an impossible mountain to climb. ~ Dave McKean

I don't think there's an illustrator who's as good as a Titian or a Rembrandt ... but then, Rembrandt was a bit of an illustrator on the quiet, you know? ~ Quentin Blake

You've got to give kids really beautiful children's books in order to turn them into revolutionaries. Because if they see these beautiful things when they're young, when they grow up they'll see the real world and say, 'Why is the world so ugly?! I remember when the world was beautiful.' And then they'll fight, and they'll have a revolution. They'll fight against all of our corruption in the world, they'll fight to try to make the world more beautiful. That's the job of a good children's book illustrator. ~ Tony Millionaire

The writing process isn't something I'm in love with. I'm an illustrator who writes. ~ Chris Riddell

I'm not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I've written enough history books to know this isn't one. I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?'
Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually - I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any. ~ Wallace Stegner

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text ... the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story. ~ Maurice Sendak

I'm an illustrator. I have to accept my role. ~ Maurice Sendak

Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it's nice to not have to dread introductions. "What you do for a living?" It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it's not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents' generation are familiar with the term "graphic novel," which is kind of amazing. ~ Adrian Tomine

I love being an illustrator because I get to read really great stories, work with amazing people, travel and see places I never would've seen. And I get to draw all the time. ~ Brian Selznick

I have loved enough women to know how to paint.
If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet. ~ Sarah Ruhl

Fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez was a major part of my early career. ~ Andre Leon Talley

wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. Originally, these ~ Smashing Magazine

I wound up studying art and design, got a job at Lonely Planet Publications as a designer, cartographer and illustrator. ~ Trudi Canavan

I thought that if I couldn't make a living as an artist, at least I shouldn't starve.

By the time I had finished these studies, I had realized that I simply did not draw well enough to be the kind of artist and illustrator that I wanted to be, and so for two days a week over two years I drew - and drew and drew - from the models in the life classes at Chelsea School of Art. I really found out how people looked and moved and balanced, and though nowadays I almost never use a sketchbook and just make everything up as I go along, it's those days in the life room that are the back of it all. ~ Quentin Blake

When I illustrate a cover or a book, I draw upon what the author tells me; that's how I see my responsibility as an illustrator. J.K. Rowling is very descriptive in her writing - she gives an illustrator a lot to work with. Each story is packed full of rich visual descriptions of the atmosphere, the mood, the setting, and all the different creatures and people. She makes it easy for me. The images just develop as I sketch and retrace until it feels right and matches her vision. ~ Mary Grandpre

Literature works from mind to mind and is more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things, to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say 'he ate bread', the dramatic producer or painter can only show 'a piece of bread' according to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in general and picture it in some form of his own. If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below', the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Information and inspiration are everywhere ... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture. ~ John Howe

I grew up wanting only to be an illustrator. I studied art at Laurel School in Cleveland and at Smith College. ~ Natalie Babbitt

Sometimes I defy flower anatomy & other times I try and replicate it intricately! ~ Minnelli Lucy France

Before that I wanted to be a magazine illustrator - I probably would have painted Gothic scenes. ~ Ira Levin

Fortunately, I'm able to make a living from comics, so I'm privileged enough to be quite choosy, though most cartoonists can't afford to be. It's really an uncomfortable situation, since I'm not an illustrator, though I do get calls from morally indefensible businesses offering me money to decorate their ambitions. It's extremely rare, almost unheard of, in fact, that I am asked to do a comic strip. Do writers get calls to pen Toyota advertisements? Do composers get asked to write chamber pieces about exercise machines? ~ Chris Ware

I'm not a painter by any stretch of the imagination; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditional illustrator, and I begin with black and white. If I need colour, I add it over the top. There's a calligraphic element to it ... it's about the texture of lines on the page. ~ Chris Riddell

My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it's a different way of expression, a different field of art. They're not separated; everything for me is related. ~ Marjane Satrapi

It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision. ~ Matthea Harvey

I majored in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, although I never had any intention of being an illustrator and didn't take any classes in illustration there. It was just that the illustration degree had no requirements. ~ Brian Selznick

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations. ~ Tony Kushner

A random guy I met at a party I went to in high school told me not to study creative writing because in his opinion studying creative writing as a major sucks the love of writing out of you (he was a creative writing major, so he said he would know). I did not want the love of writing sucked out of me, so I followed his advice (however, I did take a few creative writing workshops at IU and I enjoyed them very much). Instead, I had the love of art sucked out of me. Years later I met that guy from the party again in New York City where I moved after college to be an illustrator, and we got married. ~ Meg Cabot

An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there. ~ Maurice Sendak

And I had worked at the comic-book store almost by accident, because I was deciding to make a living as an artist, be it as an art tutor or illustrator, and that's how I wanted to make my living. ~ Brian Michael Bendis

It's like a candy store for an illustrator, I connected with Harry pretty quickly and loved the way J.K. described everything; she's such a visually thinking person. You can't pass that up. ~ Mary Grandpre

I had a job as an illustrator, and I wanted to change the direction of my work. I moved to the country, and immediately I started to paint fairies and trolls. ~ Brian Froud

I'm a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics. ~ Richard MacDonald

I used to sit in the studio with a copy of the (Saturday Evening) Post laid across my knees ... And then I'd conjure up a picture of myself as a famous illustrator and gloat over it, putting myself in various happy situations, surrounded by admiring females, deferred to by office flunkies at the magazines, wined and dined by the editor ... ~ Norman Rockwell

Sometimes when I am painting large flowers, I imagine that I am the bee. ~ Minnelli Lucy France

When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn. ~ Daniel Handler

I love making films, playing video games, designing pictures on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator. But what I felt so impressed about my life. Is that I finally got my chance to write stories just for the hell of it. To me, it helps with my life. It calms me down. The narrative stories is what captures me. More characters, but big connections. And that's what it took for me to become a writer. ~ Robert Augustine Capone

Sometimes we just need a little break from this thing we call 'life', and step into the cartoon life for a moment ~ Andrea L'Artiste

You don't put your head above the parapet and become a personality if you're an illustrator - it's not part of it; it's not possible. You are a servant to the story. ~ Robert Ingpen

Usually, an author writes a manuscript that is handed in to the editor. The editor will then work with an art director to find just the right illustrator for the job, and off they go. Many times, the illustrator and author never meet. ~ Tony DiTerlizzi

I adore the elegance of botanical realism but I also can't help but dream of my very own neo-surrealistic fantasy flowers, and so I paint and illustrate both; I always find myself between both of those worlds. ~ Minnelli Lucy France

As an illustrator you need to understand the human body - but having looked at and understood nature, you must develop an ability to look away and capture the balance between what you've seen and what you imagine. ~ Quentin Blake

Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I've always called myself an illustrator. I'm not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life. ~ Norman Rockwell

I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that. ~ Adrian Tomine

Rachel believes in it, the laws of of pattern formation and how they are universal: whatever she sees, crystallizing, a landscape of fractals, of emergence and symmetry, her world falling happily into shape where he must forge it, a pioneer of industry, sooty and scarred. For Rachel Wolff, quite simply, there are patterns everywhere, she can't help it; she is an illustrator, naturalist, cartographer - and her eye, a kaleidoscope. ~ Emma Richler

Andy [Warhol] was on the scene, but he wasn't an artist at first; he was more an illustrator. He was always surrounded by about ten people who worshipped him. He'd go to a party and they would all come along. But he was drawing shoes and that sort of thing. ~ Claes Oldenburg

In my youth I dreamed of being an illustrator. ~ Terence Stamp

I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a book illustrator. I used to hurry home from school and draw. ~ Natalie Babbitt

When I later discovered that she (illustrator Faith Jaques) was a compulsive reader who loved to be alone and kept cats because they are the only pets that allow you to be both, my adoration of Jaques and her work could only increase. ~ Lucy Mangan

The Biblical Illustrator was published in 66 volumes. To give you a sense of how comprehensive it is, volume 49 contains 588 pages on Galatians. And ~ Joseph S. Exell

I'm sure it came as no surprise to my friends and family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book. ~ Philip Reeve

Speaking of line, what artist of line was ever able to find more depth and volume than Hirschfeld? He was an illustrator and a caricaturist, but first and foremost, an artist. ~ Billy Cannon

For a while, I just thought that I wanted to be an illustrator because that's all I wanted to do. I also did some sculpting. It was always very artsy and very feminine, everything that I did. ~ Jason Wu

As an artist, illustrator, and photographer, most of my daily work was formed around the Art & Entertainment business, which was about packaging ideas that looked like they were crafted as artist ideas. In the distributed products, my artist credit was hidden inside the package of the artist or entertainment personality. ~ John Van Hamersveld

I wanted to become a cartoon artist, a portrait artist, and an illustrator. This was my first idea. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

I knew that I wanted to be an illustrator since I was in kindergarten. I can remember the exact day. The art teacher usually came to our classroom once a week, but she was absent that day. Instead, our regular teacher gave us each a huge piece of paper and crayons, and we could do whatever we wanted. ~ Jan Brett

Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story. ~ Philip Reeve

I've had so many influences and sources of inspiration as an illustrator that it is impossible to name just one. I loved Aubrey Beardsley when I was a student, and then Edmund Dulac and other Golden Age illustrators made a big impact, as well as Victorian painters like Richard Dadd and Edward Burne-Jones. My long-term heroes though are Albretch Durer, Brueghel, Hieronymous Bosch, Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo, Botticelli, Rembrandt, Turner and Degas. What most of them have in common is brilliant draughtsmanship and a strong linear or graphic quality. Most are also printmakers. The one I keep going back to and who fascinates me the most is JMW Turner, the greatest watercolourist. ~ Alan Lee

God Is The Artist Of Your Landscape

Will things always work out in the way you hope and want? Of course not! You are not the illustrator of your life painting. God has all the hues and brush strokes worked out. The painting He is creating, thanks to the struggle He has given you, is a masterpiece. ~ Cheryl Zelenka