Telling Stories Without Telling Them

By Galina Bakinova

We are used to the fact that illustration is most often a storytelling through visual images, but what if I say that you can tell a story through sensations while maintaining visuality? What if the illustration doesn’t have a single image of the character, no clear plot line, but the viewer sees both the character and the plot? This is impossible, you say, but I will answer that this is quite possible.

I’m going to tell you about one of my favorite illustration projects, which I created back in 2023.
The series of illustrations called “Balance and Movement” started as a simple illustration project where I only had a color palette and a very abstract goal – to make something minimalist, stylish and character-free. The illustrations were planned for website splash screens.

How make an empty illustration interesting

For example, how many seconds will a website visitor stay on the “Error 404” page? A second? Two seconds? All such pages are usually faceless and boring, so boring that the visitor runs away from there, barely having time to read the inscription to the end.

The story of my illustrations began with the page “404 Error”. I asked myself, why not make it interesting. But what can you come up with as an illustration that depicts emptiness? And then I thought that emptiness itself can be filled, that I can work not with objects, but with sensations. This is where my work with associations and metaphorical images began. As an image of emptiness, I had an association with drifting in the space of an endless ocean. It was decided to make the image of the character as abstract as possible, so I came up with an orange ball. A round, volumetric, geometric figure of a warm color, what could be more abstract? Moreover, it was the warm orange ball that became the metaphor of the character and the main character of the illustrations of the entire series.

I decided to make the environment flat and schematic. For the Error page, I drew a ball floating in schematic thread-waves on a featureless beige background. The main thing for me here was not the storyline, but the feeling of being lost that the user usually experiences when he or she realizes that he or she has not found the page they need. The beige background and thin white lines coped with this task quite well. 

Metaphor in an illustration

Then I realized that drawing sensations is quite difficult. How can you depict instability or movement without a character? And I realized that I needed to rely on metaphors. I started using the image of waves as a metaphor for instability and movement. I changed the background and wave colors to a rich, deep, dark green. And the same illustration transformed from one of lost wanderings into one of struggle and overcoming.

By adding a shadow and placing the ball inside the waves, I got a completely new illustration, now it showed the ball moving forward on a solid surface. The balloon in the illustration seems to be slowly but confidently overcoming difficulties. The waves, which now represent obstacles, part before it, allowing the ball to calmly overcome its path. A sense of confidence and calm was conveyed through the use of a neutral background. I also added some air around to achieve this effect. The waves don’t touch the ball, but rather curve around it, spreading out to create space in front of it.

How to draw emptiness

The waves without the ball can convey a feeling of emptiness, serenity. Due to the texture of the background, I got a metaphorical image of desert dunes, viewed from above.

Then I decided to move away from the associations with waves and thought about how else the ball could move. The spiral movement seemed very aesthetic to me if depicted from above. I conveyed the illusion of infinity of movement through the image of a spiral.

Another way to convey the dynamics of movement was the way to visualize the ball’s track in space.
By drawing the path, I created the impression that the ball was rolling along the path and bouncing on it.

The series of illustrations with the ball gradually turned into a short story about it. In this narrative there is neither an image of the hero nor the purpose of his movement. The abstract geometric figure does not depict the character literally, but becomes a visual accent in the illustration. The background, which in classical illustration sets the context, here contains no narrative.

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All meaning in illustrations is conveyed through sensations. Metaphors work very well in achieving the goal, while keeping the illustration abstract in meaning. The resulting set of illustrations is a set of abstract compositions, not connected by plot, but united by emotional logic and at the same time telling an abstract story quite successfully.