Current trends and artists: search and find illustration

Now that we’ve covered a bit of the history of wimmelbilder illustrations, I wanted to explore the current trends and introduce some fellow artists that also create some pretty busy scenes.

Some of my work as a wimmelbilder illustrator.

Nowadays we see the “where’s wally style” of illustration in a variety of situations – marketing, educational material, hidden objects games (now even digital ones!), editorial content and so on. As shown in the picture above, I love creating scenes with a “miniature world” feeling and fun events going on all around the image for the viewer to explore, while adjusting the style of the buildings and characters to suit the needs of each job.

I want to start with the French illustrator Ugo Gattoni, that was on the news this week with the official posters for the next Olympic Games – Paris 2024! The artist mixes the language of architecture drawings with oniric and surrealist elements, creating worlds that drag you into it to explore each detail.

Poster for the Paris-2024 Olympic Games by Ugo Gattoni

Architecture is also a highlight in the creations of Japanese studio IC4 Design, famous for the Pierre The Maze Detective children’s book series. With clean lines and lots of tiny people filling up the images, the studio creates worlds that almost feel like a game… Which they actually created as well!

Screenshot of the game Labyrinth City, based on Pierre the Maze Detective series.

Games are also part of the trajectory of fellow Brazilian illustrator Mauro Martins, who was one of the artists, along other like Dave Hill and Dan Woodger, who created scenes for the Scavenger Hunt part of the mobile game Two Dots. It just shows the potential of hidden object pictures to be the foundation for some awesome gaming experiences!

Scenes from the game Two Dots

Another Brazilian artist who works with seek and find illustrations is Victor Beuren, who even made a course showing the steps needed to created such detailed illustrations.

Some of Victor's work

Mattias Adolfsson also has a very unique style, working with pen and paper and watercolors - he also publishes tons of his incredibly creative sketchbook pages, definitely worth looking at.

One of Mattias's sketchbook pages

Another artist I wanted to highlight is Marija Tiurina. With characters full of personality and whimsical landscapes, her search and find scenes are one of a kind.

There are many more wonderful artists working with busy scenes and creating hidden object pictures, but I thought it would be nice to highlight some of them and show how you can get such different looks and uses for this kind of illustration.

A recent history of wimmelbilder

In the last post we talked a bit about the origins of seek and find/wimmelbild illustrations way back in the 1600s, but there’s a long way to go from Bosch’s paintings to the illustrations we are familiarized with nowadays.

Ali Mitgutsch is usually considered the father of modern search and find illustration, with his first book in this style released in 1968, Rundherum in meiner Stadt.

Source: ravensburger.de

Depicting everyday scenes in vibrant environments, the images are full of tiny events that are either happening at the moment (like the lady dropping her bags when hit by a bike) or about to happen (like the car almost hitting the dogs). I am particularly fond of “about to happen” moments, as they make the scene feel alive and help immerse the viewer in that world.

Another interesting thing to point out is the use of a top-down view, which later on became popular in games like Pokémon, that makes it possible to have a very large scene without losing details in the front of each element, such as the buildings’ façades. This is actually a topic I want to discuss in more detail in another post!

Another artist from around that same period that worked with the concept of showing a large scene of lots of things happening at once was Richard Scarry. Though many of the artwork featured in his books are simpler, with much smaller scenes, he did explore image that resemble a lot current wimmelbilder, such as in the sketch below.

Source: richarscarry.com

After these books in the 1960s, the use of “wimmelbild" style became very popular to create images for children's books and activities. I want to mention here Dutch comic artist Jan van Haasteren, who back in 1979 started making illustrations for jigsaw puzzles that featured very busy crowd scenes.

Source: jvh-puzzels.nl

About 20 years after Rundherum in meiner Stadt, what became the most popular hidden object book series was first released – Where’s Wally, by Martin Handford.

The main collection consists of seven books, released from 1987 to 2009, and was a worldwide phenomenon – so much so that “Where’s Wally style” became almost a synonym to “search and find”, hidden object or wimmelbild illustrations. Each book consists of a series of double spreads with crowd scenes in different locations – each one taking eight weeks to be drawn.

Source:wally.walker.co.uk

Nowadays, we have quite a few illustrators (myself included :) ) who love to create fantastical worlds full of details to explore. You can find them not only in books, but also digital games, puzzles, marketing campaigns, editorial illustrations etc. We’ll talk more about the current scene in search and find illustration in another post!

A history of busy scenes

When you hear expressions like “search and find illustration”, “wimmelbilder”, “seek and find”, “hidden picture book”, “hidden object game” and so on, what might come first to your head is the beloved Where’s Wally (or Waldo) book series. And although it is an incredible series, it is far from being the first take at this kind of image.

We can actually go back quite a long time, which is what we’ll do for this introduction post. Have a look at this painting made by Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch between 1490 and 1510.

The depiction of these densely populated scenes featuring lots of characters and symbolic elements was not standard for that time and can be considered an important source of inspiration for current illustrations in the Wimmelbild style. Although his themes were very specific – the artist was a Christian and depicted lots of elements that represented a life of sin and its consequences – I find it interesting that the fantastical, whimsical quality that is present in many modern “search and find” illustrations was already there in its origins.

Another artist from that era that’s worth mentioning here is Pieter Bruegel, who even came to be known at the time as “second Bosch”.

Here the themes come much closer to what we see today - he is usually considered a pioneer of genre paintings, depicting aspects of everyday life. To accomplish this idea of showing ordinary people doing their daily activities (which became an important record of social, political, and cultural nuances of the time), he sometimes resorted to busy scenes with lots of things going on at the same time. Children’s Games, from 1560, is a great example (and a direct inspiration for my Outdoor Games illustration!)

The whimsical aspect also appears on some of his works, like in “Netherlandish proverbs”, where more than 100 proverbs gain a literal, visual interpretation, as in the man “swimming against the tide”.

The mix of mundane and fantastical in his work is best described later, when the artist was ‘rediscovered’ in the 19th century. Baudelaire, in 1868, argued “these works display a certain element of system, a deliberate eccentricity, a technique of the bizarre” and James Ensor, 1924, noted “he predicted it all: light, atmosphere, mysterious life between beings and things.”

The third artist I want to highlight here is Peeter Baltens, a contemporary of Bruegels – he was first believed to be one of his followers, but it seems they actually drew inspiration from each other’s works, even collaborating on a piece. Although Baltens does not have a large production, he is definitely worth mentioning for having an important part in the creation of this kind of busy scenes, and also for the comical aspect he included in his paintings, such as Een cluyte van Plaeyerwater, where in the center you can see a theatrical play of a farce where a husband catches his wife cheating.

Pretty interesting to know the kinds of pictures we see today have their origins way back, even including those whimsical elements that make it so enticing to wander around the image. I’ll later explore some more recent history, when wimmelbilder illustrations were incorporated in popular media with a clearer “find the hidden object” aspect.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/01/bosch-bruegel-joseph-leo-koerner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXbxC_80GME

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peeter_Baltens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/0AVxnXInsx0LIg

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/NgURMIOVv_e5Ug