What is illustration?

To be honest, having thought about it, i'm not really sure. I am guilty of summing it up completely wrong to explain to various family members what exactly I'm going to pay £21,000 to go to uni to study, and have on every occasion ended up simply telling them 'it's a cross between graphic design and drawing'. Just to make it easier for my nan to understand in simple terms, without me having to explain why i'm not studying medicine like my brother.
I guess that my explanation isn't necessarily incorrect, I mean illustration does fundamentally use the same group of skills associated with graphic design and drawing, as well as other things that my nan probably doesn't understand like surface pattern design, or animation, or visual communication (she's still trying to get her head around watercolour, my nan).
I suppose it is a way of thinking with our eyes and our hands, a way of telling stories and ideas to people in our own language. It makes people see things from our perspective and yet creates a hole for people to fill with their own ideas and opinions. It is not really anything solid or explainable,
yet it stands on its own as a skill to learn and appreciate, definitely distinguishable as its own form of art and its own niche area of specialism. Sure, there are millions of ways of interpreting and forming things and ideas, but somehow, illustration is its own thing; you can love some things, hate other things, have opinions and ideas and think 'I/my three year old/my nan could do that better'. There are millions of ways of telling one story and illustration is half of that million. It's not always just a decoration or a pretty picture in a children's story book or yet another Instagram post. But sometimes it is. And I suppose thats because at the end of the day, it's just another way of doing art. It creates emotions and tells stories and makes you wonder how much it's worth. And I don't suppose an individual person can decide what art is for everyone else. Not to sound pretentious, or anything.

So why do we need illustration?

In some ways, we don't. I mean, we don't need it as much as we need to drink water or move our legs or have sex sometimes. We don't need it to fundamentally survive comfortably.
But it can help us save the bees and start to fix the ice caps and get Donald Trump to stop making a tit of himself and leave everyone alone. It is a powerful enabler that can spread messages and break language barriers and is accessible to a significant amount more people than art in a gallery or textiles in a shop, due to the internet and advertising, and the audience it reaches. It spreads ideas and themes and talent, inspiring people to visually appreciate things, whether they like it, or not, or whether they even realise thats what they've seen. It's a sought after way of problem-solving and thinking creatively, a skill that people seek as it shows initiative, self direction and confidence. It is crazy to think that telling your audience something, such as why you don't like cats, can make people laugh and also pay the rent. It is a powerful language that everyone can understand, and in today's world, I feel a lot of things can be fixed with just communicating.