A Minimalistic approach to illustration

A Death In The Family Batman Cover by Jim Aparo

The image shown to the left was my original inspiration for the latest cover for my friend PJ’s Comicbook, the Utopian. After reading the chapters to be included, I was instantly attracted to the ending. It featured a cliffhanger involving a terrible accident during a chase through a stormy night. The first image that came to mind was the one you see on the left. A very archetypal, dramatic image. I wanted to do something slightly different than rip off Jim Aparo’s work. Being a trained designer, I’ve always learned to see negative space. Being a trained illustrator allowed me to see light as a vehicle for emotion and drama. So I looked at a lot of swiss design of the mid 20th century. Mostly for their minimal use of image to convey a feeling or mood. I was instantly drawn to Armin Hoffman. As you can see from the examples above, there’s a definite reverberation of the master’s work reflected on mine. Here’s the process.

The first thing I did is sketch out a rough, this part was easy since I already had the image in my head. I brought out my 500Watt bulb clamp light and set it up near the ceiling (no joke) My sweetheart posed alongside me while the camera went off in the distance atop my tripod. After a few tries, I got what I needed, uploaded the images into photoshop and used my tablet to obscure most of the information and focused on the shapes the light made. I altered it and messed with it until it was ready to be brought into illustrator. After converting all the shapes into vectors, I proceeded to search for the right color, which was a royal pain for me, ask PJ. I settled on a very tame palette. I wanted people to focus on the protagonist at first. I tried to achieve this by framing his face with lightning (as the scene calls for) forming a triangle shape. Then, by the use of color, the viewer’s eye would be drawn by the warm hue of the fallen character’s face, thus creating an invisible vision roadmap between the two figures. I kept everything else pretty much muted. The result is below.