The Illustration Work of Ben Javens

Ben Javens draws flat, and flat is harder than it looks. The Birmingham illustrator builds his scenes from solid blocks of colour with no outlines to hide behind — a lavender field of trees, a pink-haired figure walking through it — and gets his depth from overlapping shape and tone rather than from gradient or shadow.

The palette does a lot of the work: muted purple and violet for the ground, magenta for the anchor figure, navy for the darkest shadows, and white held back for the few details that need to catch the eye. It is a folk-art register, closer to a children’s picture book than to editorial illustration, and it never patronises the viewer. Worth a look.

More of his work: benjavens.co.uk.