Personal Development: Minimal Art Style



Minimalist Art

During my time out of uni timetable I have been experimenting with various art styles to broaden my personal portfolio and develop skills with digital art programs such as Adobe creative suite and Cinema 4D. Primarily my recent work has focused with exploring the features of Adobe programs, my most recent studies have been using Adobe Illustrator to create minimal art of characters and objects in favoured games movies and fictional works. 

Minimal art is the process of creating a piece of visual art with minimal detail, be that colour or visual graphics. An interesting example of this is the portrayal of characters either fictional or icons of popculture, by simply drawing out particular features such as the subject's hair style we can recognise the who it is. I tried this style out myself with 2 characters from the popular tv show Futurama, the characters I designed in this style were Fry and professor Farnsworth. Using existing images of the two characters as a base for the illustrations. Using the pen tool on illustrator, I was able to simply outline certain features of each character. For Fry I outlined his hair and his jacket, whilst for the professor i outlined his lab coat and glasses. With an animated tv series like Futurama, it's common for animators to colour the characters, objects and scenery with block colour to save a tremendous amount of time, so when adding colour to both Fry and the professor, the original images didn't feature any shadows or highlights meaning that colouring the outlines was simply using the eyedropper tool on the original image. 

Both of the minimal designs featured a colour palette of 3-5 colours max this is including the background, the font however was coloured white. When it comes to printing minimal artwork, white is not considered as a colour due to it being the colour of standard printing paper so it doesn't use up ink down to the CYMK value of the colour white being 0000. Additional the font itself is the exact same font used in the logo for Futurama, i thought this was a nice relevant touch when creating the quotes on top of the designs.   
    


Personally with the outcome of these two designs, I prefer the design of Fry (left) more than the design of Farnsworth (right), i think this is down to the colour of the background, whilst the left one being a minty green which contrasts with the bright red and orange, as an experiment I added a blue gradient, but due to the background being blue the colours of Farnsworth didn't stand out as much.   



A More Detailed Minimalist/Vector Style
While the examples of my minimal art shown above are indeed extremely minimal in design, colour and detail, my more recent work that features minimalism focuses more on being minimal in the detail and the colour. Just like examples above, the colour palette of the more detailed designs still consist of at the maximum 3-5 colours. Instead of using the pen tool on adobe Illustrator, the more detailed ones utilise a tool called 'Trace Image' which does exactly what it's called, it traces a select image and creates a vector image from the source. You can then adjust the settings such as grey scale or just to outline the image. For my designs I select the colour option and set the number of colours to either 3 or 4. 

I personally think that 3-4 are perfect amounts to work with, it provides enough to create a design that has a base colour, shadow and highlight, an example of this is one of my more recent pieces of a fictional character called 'Kharn the Betrayer'. As you can see below, Kharn's primary colour is a Blood red whilst the shadows and highlights are a slate grey and a dirty bone colour.This effect overall still gives a minimal look whilst having more detail to the design.


This is an enjoyable process, it's simple, quick and the outcome of the design looks great. The trace tool can be used on any image to create this effect, currently i have only used this tool for fan art of favoured fictional characters and objects but I would love to try and create minimal art using this tool on self obtained photographic visual media. Below are a some other minimal fan art designs based on the game 'Fallout' that have been created using this tool.









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