Illustration personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

Illustration attracts me because it asks a very specific question: what does this text or idea actually need to look like for someone else to understand it? I first noticed that question properly when I borrowed a stack of picture books from the library to read with my younger cousin, who was finding reading difficult. He would stare past the words at the pictures, and the books that worked for him were the ones where the images carried information the sentences did not. Shirley Hughes's drawings of ordinary streets and cluttered rooms held his attention far longer than brighter, simpler artwork, because there was something to search for. That sent me looking for writing about how illustration works rather than just more images to copy. Reading Quentin Blake and John Cassidy's Beyond the Page gave me a sense of illustration as a working discipline with deadlines, briefs and negotiation, not just personal expression, and Lynda Barry's Syllabus changed how I use a sketchbook, pushing me towards drawing quickly and often instead of protecting one careful piece. I want to study Illustration at degree level because I have reached the limit of what I can teach myself from books and college projects. I need sustained criticism, printmaking and bookbinding facilities, and other people whose work is nothing like mine. In the longer term I am drawn towards editorial and children's publishing work, and I would like to understand the commercial side properly rather than guessing at it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My extended diploma in Art and Design has given me the habit of working to a brief and defending decisions out loud. Our narrative unit asked us to illustrate a folk tale, and I chose a Yoruba story my grandfather tells about a tortoise and a feast. Drafting it taught me more about editing than drawing: my first version had eleven images and no rhythm, and cutting it to six forced me to decide which moments actually turned the story. I worked in lino for the final pieces so the limited detail matched the spoken, slightly blunt quality of the tale, and I learned to plan for reversed images and registration rather than discovering problems at the press. A separate typography unit was less comfortable and more useful. I had been treating lettering as decoration, and being made to set text properly showed me how much of a page's mood comes from spacing. A level English Literature supports this constantly. Close reading a poem and working out how a stanza controls pace is not far from working out how a sequence of images controls pace, and studying unreliable narration in Wuthering Heights made me more careful about whose point of view an illustration adopts. Written coursework has also trained me to structure an argument, which helps when I write up research or explain my intentions in a group critique without simply saying that I liked the colours.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For the past two years I have helped my grandfather look after his allotment and a small flock of chickens, going up most Sunday mornings. It is repetitive, weather-dependent work, and it has been unexpectedly good for my drawing: I keep a separate sketchbook there and have filled it with hens, seed trays, netting and my grandfather's hands mending things. Drawing the same six birds repeatedly taught me to look for structure and weight rather than outline, and to accept that most sketches will be unusable. My Saturday job in a garden centre involves stocking shelves, watering and answering customer questions about plants that are dying for unclear reasons. It has made me much better at explaining things simply to people who are not experts, which I now recognise as a version of what illustration does. It also means I am used to being tired and still finishing a shift properly. At college I set up a lunchtime drawing club that meets weekly, mostly because I wanted regular life drawing and could not afford classes. I arrange models from among ourselves, keep a rota and bring timed exercises from books I have read. Persuading nervous first-year students to keep coming has taught me to give encouragement that is actually specific. I still read widely around the subject, following illustrators' process posts and borrowing exhibition catalogues, and I have started reworking my folk tale as a longer sequence to see whether it holds up at twenty pages.

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