Benjamin Rabe

iPhone Expressionist

Hotel Tango

BY BENJAMIN RABE

Artist, Web Designer

Hamburg, Germany

Benjamin Rabe describes the technical process and the thought process involved in his artwork Hotel Tango. Using minimal amounts of color and minimal visual elements, the work manages to have maximum emotional impact.

For tonal clarity, I often start in black and white; I can always add colors later. I started by making two bold strokes using brush no. 3 in “Brushes” to get rid of the blank canvas.

I just started to define some space and an object.

The radiator was molded out of the white using the soft black brush at 15 percent opacity. The outlines were defined using a 1 px brush at 70 percent opacity.

I usually block the basic figure in with a dark color, then, using the eraser, subtract small areas to define the form. I go back and forth with solid color and the eraser until I’ve got a good silhouette to build upon.

By adding some simple details, our figure is now smoking and talking on his cellphone.

I created the shadow with a black brush at 80 percent opacity, then used the same brush as an eraser.

To create a muted color, I created a blue layer at 10 percent transparency and erased the white areas. This yielded a subtle color effect. I added smoke by painting grey and broke it up with the eraser. Details to the wall were added with black opaque strokes for balance.

Out of curiosity, I painted the background out with blue that I sampled from the wall and some black strokes in the upper right to change the location. Now we’re free to put our figure wherever we want.

To finish the piece, I added some comic book great Will Eisner-style background that looks like a faint drawing in the upper left, and roughed up all the black areas using a fine multi-bristle eraser. The telephone cord, painted using a 4 px brush in a tell-tale curlicue brush stroke, settled this final image into a time way back when everyone smoked and no one had heard of a cellphone.