There are many aspects of illustration used to convey the most powerful images possible, consisting of many different mediums and traditions of depicting space, form, tone and light, composition, and color dating back hundreds(sometimes thousands) of years. Several of them had movements based around them throughout artistic history, the births and deaths of which were for various reasons, typically from political and social upheaval.
Drawing is the basic form of art, the keystone, so to speak, of visual arts. Although the pencil is the most commonly used tool for drawing there are many other different tools used for it, such as chalk, crayon, pastel, and graphite, with eraser tools called rubbers ranging from hard to soft for various purposes.
Painting, printmaking, and assemblage are three other forms of visual art. Painting has been used for thousands of years through a variety of natural substances used to make paints and inks, and applied to a variety of surfaces with brushes, rollers, squeegees, hands, and sometimes the human body itself. In modern days illustrators have tended to prefer water-based paints over oil-based colors, which includes paints like gouache, acrylic, and watercolor.
Printmaking is essentially a wide array of techniques used to enable an image to be reproduced, which includes Wood engraving, Linocut, Drypoint, Etching, Engraving, Lithography, Screenprinting, Monoprinting, and Digital printing. Most of these techniques involve carving out a design from a certain object using certain tools, placing ink on it then running it through a press to put the ink design onto paper or some other medium.
Assemblage is unique in that it uses pieces of actual images and combines them together in a new way, creating a strange patchwork that one wouldn't expect to see together, and this method was made popular by the Surrealist and Dada movements.
