ART STYLES - INFORMATION/REFERENCE TITLE

Children's reference books often use realism in their illustrations, and combine these with photography. Dorling Kindersley are famed for their children's encyclopaedias and atlases and use this mix of styles within their work to remain informative and interesting, and it is often necessary that these images are accurate and to scale.

This is shown in the above images. The spread with the beetle comparison seems to be mainly photographic, with all the insects scaled to the same degree to easily show size differences, and the pages about the children also mainly use photography, though there seems to be a few small illustrations on the page as well. This one seems quite dated due to the style of photography and page layout, and wouldn't have inspired me as a child, but there is a lot of information to convey there. The illustration of the squid is very realistic, which may be needed in the context of the encyclopaedia.

The Horrible Histories series made great use of illustrations within the books, which matched the tongue-in-cheek, humorous and occasionally gruesome text. Three illustrators were used for the series; Martin Brown, Mike Phillips and Philip Reeve, but a consistent style meant that the changes weren't noticeable across the titles.

These use a much more informal approach, with mainly line drawings within the books and a colourfully rendered and often embossed cover. The internal illustrations often resembled newspaper editorial cartoons, and used puns and humour which appealed to me when I read the books. I think this style of fun illustration can have a greater effect than realism, although sometimes that is required within the context of the book.