This research deals with the creation of style in children's book illustration from the perspective of the illustrator. Contemporary picture books are those whose narrative takes shape in the union between linguistic and iconic message (NIKOLAJEVA and SCOTT); and style is considered to be a set of graphic elements with narrative potential to convey different meanings (MENDES), since drawing is always codified and, therefore, suffers the influence of style (BARTHES). Based on what Perry Nodelman tells us about style in picture books, we understand that referencing pre-existing styles can be a recourse for adding connoted meanings to the illustrations and, as Nilton Gamba complements, it may also represent ideologies.

This article aims to present a methodology for creating style in children's book illustrations that refer to specific concepts according to the illustrator's choices for a project. This methodology was developed as part of an experiment carried out in my master's research presented in the dissertation entitled The Construction of Style in Illustration for Children's Literature: A Case Study from the Perspective of the Illustrator. The set of parameters defined by the illustrator to compose the illustrations style we will call “writing”, according to the concept proposed by Roland Barthes, that includes the conscious choices made by the author, which are mediated by the blind forces of his personal style and culture.

In the referred experiment, I observed my personal process for style elaboration that I developed based on my professional experience as an illustrator. In a simulated project situation, the starting point was a text adapted from a popular short story by Silvio Romero. As in a real project, I challenged myself to elaborate a visual language for the illustrations that would refer to the idea of “brazilian popular culture” and afterwards point out the defining parameters to create a cohesive set of images for the book. We sought to outline the stylistic conventions that characterize the idea of “brazilian popular culture” through the observation of referential images of brazilian popular art. Firstly, an illustration was created based on visual language variables collected from these images. Because it was not possible to verify whether the illustration would in fact refer the reader to the idea of “brazilian popular culture”, a second approach was taken, this time collecting the connotated meanings found in the reference images to incorporate them in a second illustration. For this survey, we used a method inspired by the one used by Roland Barthes in the analysis of Panzani advertising. Afterwards, the methodological and graphic guidelines used to create the illustration were pointed out to compose the guiding script to create the other images that would compose the book.

As a result, we propose a tool for image creation based on a tool for image analyses. It can be used by illustrators create different styles based on any concepts they want to refer on their projects, regardless of the cultural context in which it occurs.