Should you study animation or illustration?

If you’re currently in high school and you want to pursue visual art in College or University, but you’re not quite sure which program to choose, keep reading this article! I’m going to go over some of the fine distinctions between the two.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was in the same boat. I didn’t know what the difference was between graphic design, fine art, illustration, animation, or the other more specific visual arts. I thought that animation simply meant cartooning, like the kind you’d find in the newspaper. While all these different terms make it seem complicated, wait until you see how many more different roles there are once you are out working in the art and design industries! It gets even more complicated. Hopefully this article can help you choose one of these broad categories of art.

An example of how complex the artistic roles can get in an indie game studio.

I was most interested in drawing comics and making fantasy artwork like Lord of the Rings. I now call this kind of artwork “story-based artworks”. This encompasses a wide variety of art, such as video game concept art, fantasy board game cover and card artwork, storyboarding for animated movies and TV shows, and many more. Basically, any artwork that contributes to telling a story. Things that wouldn’t fit within this category are: conceptual art (being distinct from concept art believe it or not!), branding and graphic design, typography, etc. Those all solve particular design problems, but they generally do not involve creating artwork to help tell a larger narrative.

Aside from thinking about whether you want to create artwork for stories, there is also the consideration of whether you want to create representational art (people, places, things) or non-representational art (abstract art, designs, patterns).

Juan Gris by Pablo Picasso, Representational or non-representational?!

If your answer is YES to stories and YES to representational art, then animation may be a great choice for you. In an animation program, you will ideally learn a lot about drawing characters, backgrounds / locations, objects, props, vehicles, as well as storyboarding which involves all of the above but also being the director of the camera. So you need to be conscious of things like camera angle, pacing, cadence, and the other aspects of filmmaking. It will also teach you to actually ‘animate’ of course, so creating the illusion of life by making characters move and talk. If some of this is exciting to you, that’s great! You don’t necessarily have to do or enjoy all of these things, in fact, the expectation is that you will specialize in a small handful of them by the time you graduate.

An early style test for the animated film ‘Klaus’ by SPA Studios

Illustration, on the other hand, could involve similar endeavors; creating illustration for still art forms such as comic books, book covers, children’s book illustration, or it could involve more abstraction. It could mean creating a blend of representational and non-representational art, such as spot illustrations for newspapers or magazines. If you have a look at some of these, you’ll see that some are very representational (they may have figures and locations in them) and then some may be more symbolic, such as the one below.

Image by Eiko Ojala, https://www.behance.net/gallery/113692429/Editorila-illustrations-2020

For this reason, illustration is a little more open-ended, it prioritizes uniqueness of artistic style and techniques more. It talks a lot about your specific mode of expression, similar to fine art and a lot of the art assignments in high school, whereas in animation, story is king.

Another big distinction is that in the animation industry once you graduate, you are usually working in a studio as part of a team (though there are small and large studios, each with their perks). This is due to the fact that an animated production, be it a video or movie, require A LOT of artists to contribute to assemble the final product. Just look at the credits of any animated movie! The general categories of animation are commercials, TV shows, feature films, and videogames, but there are many cross overs and even some new forms emerging every day. Contrary to animators, illustrators are more often lone wolves working remotely. For this reason, good illustration programs usually incorporate some light business skills into them too, so that you can understand contracts and client communication so that you can protect yourself from those who may abuse business practices.

Some commonalities between both illustration and animation programs are that they both stress the importance of figure drawing, drawing things in perspective (such as still lifes or location drawing), and both allow you plenty of room to find your own drawing style, though illustration is a little more focused on this. Both involve painting both traditionally and digitally, and both usually have hefty workloads when you’re in the program! There is a huge amount of crossover depending on what the illustrator is interested in.

For example, an illustrator could specialize in visual development for animation, which involves painting images to help convey the overall look of an animated film at the beginning stage of a production. These are still images, so fall within the domain of illustrators, but also involve the general medium of animation, so it also falls within the domain of animators. So an animator would equally have the skills to be in the same role. Likewise, an animator who wants to focus more on painting than moving characters in an animated sequence, would equally be able to become a children’s book illustrator or comic artist.

Unlike many fine art programs, animation and illustration both stress the importance of the real-world application of these art forms. They both are very job-centric (music to many a parent’s ears!), unlike something like conceptual art (being distinct from concept art for film or video games) which tends to rely more on specific, niche applications or government grants to fund them.

Despite the distinctions between the programs, I’m never surprised to see the many similarities between all of the visual arts, and even occasionally non-visual art forms like music, theatre, and dance. Art is said to be the universal language and you really begin to see why when you’ve been a working artist for a number of years.

I hope this brief overview has been helpful to explain the general differences and similarities between animation and illustration, as well as some of the other visual arts.

PortPrep has helped many students get into both animation and illustration programs over the past ten years, as well as architecture and interior design. If you are a student or parent of a student interested in getting into one of these programs, have a look at our online classes available or book a free portfolio interview. We are a small company and very proud of our students’ portfolio success rate, and we love getting to know our students’ families!