The fine line between illustration and “fine art”

Can illustration be fine art?

In college, I had a hard time deciding what my major would be. I was seriously going back and forth between illustration and fine art.

In the end, I chose illustration because there seemed to be a more practical use for it, and there were also more potential job opportunities with that practice.

Even though I chose illustration, I ended up in web design for most of my career, but that’s another story!

In my senior year at the Cleveland Institute of Art, we were assigned a thesis project that was to be completed within the timeframe of half, or all, of that final year. I decided that I would take on a children’s book about animals.

As I was planning the book, I had to figure out how I wanted to paint the animals, so I did a series of tests, trying to decide what looked best and what I enjoyed painting or creating.

Most of the artwork was a cross between illustration and fine art, which is why I think my artwork looks like that today.

Here are a few of my experiments from that time:

I kept trying to capture a “lazy line” outlining everything. I was really drawn to how it looked when others did it. 

What I liked the most were the colorful portraits of animals that I did with watercolor markers. My overall goal with these experiments was to create a drawing, but to have it also fade into the background and feel really artsy.

I would draw the lines with one color, then loosely fill in the rest with another color, and then apply water to see what happened.

When it worked well, parts of the illustration would be in focus, with the rest fading into the background.

I managed to create ten animal portraits with this style. I still really love them today, and it brings me a lot of joy when I  look at these colorful and fun pieces.

Here are all of them: nicolehanusekart.com/product-tag/thesis-illustrations

So what do you think, can illustration also be fine art?