Welcome! I assume that you’ve come to the SECOND page of this blog because you are, indeed, interested in doing research using illustration.

Before we begin, I want to share my aim for this series. I plan to keep these posts short, mainly so I don’t lose momentum and interest. It would be lovely to write comprehensive 3,000-word blogs, but that sounds daunting and is an easy drop when times get busy. So, I hope these posts are short enough to remain interesting for me while giving you enough information to understand this field. You can always follow up or comment to chat further!

I want to start off with how I view the size and stance of illustration research. The short answer is minuscule. Even at my university with a well-established research environment and a robust creative arts and design department, illustration remains small and elusive. Personally, I started my PhD in a non-illustration department at Loughborough University and was approached by an illustration tutor who found me on social media – through, I think, one of those ‘you may know Karen because you both follow the same accounts’ type of suggestion. I genuinely had no idea that illustration was offered at this university until he reached out. Which was more than a bit embarrassing (and an illustration of my research skills!).  

This may be because illustration is not an independent department at our school, unlike, say, institutions such as Camberwell College of Arts, part of the University of the Arts London, which has a strong and dedicated department for illustration. Still, it’s safe to say that this field is quite small and young. Just sprouting, perhaps. We regulars are highly active though, and all of us are welcoming and friendly. I am a fairly newbie in the field as well, and I imagine this field and like-minded individuals must’ve been even smaller than it is now. It’s heartwarming to see the community grow. These are my people.

From the academic side, there has been a steady stream of seminal books that explain what this field is all about. Check out some of the books from Bloomsbury’s illustration research series. 

At my university, illustration is often seen as a tool for a bigger research agenda than a research topic on its own. Indeed, a quick screening of the literature with the keyword ‘illustration’ on Google Scholar agrees with what I face. Many colleagues assume that my medium is a part of a general ‘creative means’ to answer bigger research questions. But, for me, illustration and using illustration are core aspects of my research questions, and that’s what makes me a researcher in illustration. I will dig deeper into what a research question is in a later post.