Children's Book Illustration of the Late 20th – Early 21st Century in Ukraine as a Means of Visual Communication

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to reveal the illustration of children’s books of the late 20th – early 21st centuries in Ukraine as a means of visual communication that combines aesthetic, pedagogical, and socio-cultural functions. The methodology is based on a comparative-historical approach to record changes in the publishing field and printing practices; structural-semiotic analysis to describe the visual codes of the cover, peritext, and illustrative spread; the application of elements of iconographic, compositional, and coloristic analysis to establish methods of image creation; the use of cultural interpretation to explain the communicative functions of children’s book illustrations in the interaction ‘text – image – reader’. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the proposed integrative interpretation of children’s book illustration as a communicative system, where the author’s visual solutions provide the content concretisation of the text, regulation of the emotional tone of reading and the formation of the child’s visual literacy. The relevance of the approaches of art criticism and educational aspects, which outline the interpretative strategies of the illustrator and the pedagogical function of the image, is argued. Conclusions. As a result of the study, the illustration of a children’s book in Ukraine of the late 20th – early 21st centuries appears as a means of visual communication that combines aesthetic, pedagogical, and socio-cultural functions. The combination of the continuity of the traditions of book graphics and accelerated technological modernisation changes production standards, the professional role of the illustrator and the range of artistic techniques. The author’s illustration of a children’s book enhances the functions of identifying the publication and organising reading, and digital tools increase stylistic variability without reducing the significance of the drawing, composition, and colour. A promising direction for further research is to expand the empirical corpus of specific children’s publications of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, taking into account regulatory requirements for printing and analysing reader reception.