Mind the Gap

A systematized reference work with illustrations, explanations, exercises, examples, tips, and lecture texts about drawing and illustration as narrative strengths of visual transmission.

How pictures can be used to tell a story, how are they made, and how the head and the hand collaborate in the creative process? Just as each image is unique, so are the individual intentions of the artists. The technical craftsmanship of HOW is as much a decisive criterion for the quality of an image as its contextual WHAT.

In addition to all depiction methods, rules of design, and phenomena of perception, a number of additional factors are important in making convincingly narrated images. This book invites readers to question the world with alert eyes, to discard conventions and to open up to other ways of thinking and new ways of seeing and approaching things: to dare to be playful and ready for any kind of experiment, to ultimately throw all rules overboard in order to find their very own artistic individuality. The author’s approach is not so much a step-by-step instruction with templatelike schemes, instead it focuses on the intrinsic logic of things, their connections and relations, and the link between presentation and design.

About the Author

Ute Helmbold studied communication design and has been working as a freelance illustrator and picture author since 1987. In 1995, she was appointed professor of informative graphics/illustration at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts.