ll is said and done the illustrator's strongest asset is spirit.
Technique and a grain of insight will help a man over many a rut in
portraiture, and a knowledge of patting clay and using a chisel has
saved many a sculptor, but technical equipment alone never made an
illustrator, because he deals too directly with life in action. Slack
drawing and impatience of method will always be pardoned in an
illustrator, if his picture convinces.

Let a writer tell of a pair in love and the illustrator pictures their
kiss; if he convinces the reader that the kiss is in earnest, the
drawing may be full of faults, but the point is made and nothing more
is asked, save that "she" be pretty and "he" manly. Consider the
difficulty of this trick of convincing, when the words of love
carefully weighed and prepared by the author and set into the
atmosphere of a scene equally well prepared will often occasion
derisive smiles. So it may be explained that the purpose of
illustration is to carry the spirit of action rather than to serve as
a basis for deft expression of technical skill, and illustration will
reach its highest development along the lines which give it an excuse
for its existence.

The mechanical processes for the reproduction of illustrations have
served to develop various methods of drawing the original picture. The
half-tone screen in connection with photography has made possible an
almost exact copy of the artist's work, and at very small cost.
Formerly an illustration was drawn on a wood block and turned over to
a wood engraver, who laboriously cut it into the block and as he cut
away the drawing as he worked it was impossible to compare his
reproduction with the original. It can be readily seen that only a
very good engraver was to be trusted to reproduce anything of value,
and as there were never very many engravers of the first class,
artists' work usually suffered. Half-tone engraving reproduces a
drawing by photography and necessarily shows much of the individual
method of the artist. Zinc etching of pen-and-ink drawings is even
more exact in its results. Lately, methods of reproducing colored
originals and paintings have been brought forward, and the results are
surprisingly good. Scientific photography is at the bottom of this,
and the old method of lithography, which demanded ten or twelve
printings in reproduction, and then fell short, seems to have seen the
last day on which it will break the heart of the artist