9 An Introduction to Spot Illustrations

What Part of a Story to Tell in a Spot?

If I’m speaking in generalizations in this chapter, it’s because there will always be another way to solve a problem in illustration. However, given the small nature of a spot illustration–it simply does not have the room to do too much–many spot illustrations pick very small details from the story to illustrate. Pick up your copy of any of the Harry Potter books to see that Mary GrandPrè, the first illustrator of these books, uses small illustrations at the top of each chapter. Think of a detail of Harry Potter playing Quidditch. Think of the Golden Snitch, a cauldron, a three-headed dog, or the Mirror of Erised. These were all her choices of spot illustrations: individual details, short and relatively unimportant narrative moments,^[2] or characters that can easily be distilled into a small illustration. She generally placed spots beneath the chapter title and the first sentence of the chapter itself, a classic approach to spot illustrations that has been standard in book publication for years, one that gives the reader a sense of what’s to come in the chapter.  If you look at this illustration, you can see that her chapter spots became increasingly complex as she proceeded through the series, incorporating not just small items or single characters, but environment and even two or more characters in one spot.

Here’s an example of using a spot as a chapter header:

But of course you don’t have to choose this location. You can embed a picture anywhere on the page–or even two spots on one page if they will fit. The most important thing is that the spot is on the same page as that scene from the story, and that the text still can flow in a logical and legible manner.

Get Creative!

I generally counsel students to pick small moments from a story to illustrate in a spot. But again, there’s ways around this if you really want to have fun with the spot.

See this illustration for Alice in Wonderland. Tenniel has planned the composition to fit in an “L” shape so that the text may be inserted below. In the age of typesetting with metal type, this clear division was necessary. But it’s still deliberately planned out.

But not all spot illustrations are planned so well, and there are things to avoid. You do not want to overlap the illustration and the text as a general rule, unless the illustration is so light that it does not compete. But better to plan a space in the composition for the text. See here, in this illustration from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 

You see that the illustration, printed in green and black, works well for the space with the Tin Man, which has the benefit of the contrast of the black ink, and is not overlaid by text. However, the green background of the trees competes not only in color but in texture and line: the shifting tones of the green bark of the trees and the white of the paper compete with the text. It doesn’t work. Unfortunately, the artist repeats this tendency, even in the starts of chapter spots:

This would work perfectly without the texture of the green below the illustration. Remember, the goal of illustration is to communicate, so if your chosen design obscures the words, you are not meeting that that most basic goal.

Many authors, such as Jim Kay, have gotten increasingly complex in their approach to spot illustrations. They can be spot spreads, taking up two pages as long as the text also plays a part. They can act as banners across the top or bottoms of one or two pages.  This allows the artist to show more information in a spot than they had traditionally been able to do. For instance, click through the images here to see how illustrator Julia Sardà solved spot illustrations for The Folio Society’s edition of The Wizard of Oz.