ABSTRACT
A significant production of illustrated books and picture books only emerged in Colombia in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Illustrated books and picture books specially directed to child and juvenile audiences were first produced in Colombia in the context of certain material and non-material conditions. Towards the middle of the 1970s, from a concern about the qualitative improvement of the education emerged an improvement that, among other goals, should have enabled a solution to crisis. As part of this school libraries program, the project "Laboratory of Literature for Children and Young People" was conceived and carried out as a mechanism to build a documentation center of books for children and youth. The emergence of children's illustration was shaped by both national motivations and international developments. This chapter presents an historical overview of picture books and the illustration.
