Elliot Kruszynski’s Flat-Vector Illustration

Elliot Kruszynski draws with a single, unvarying line: thin black outlines of uniform weight that hold together solid blocks of colour. His characters have exaggerated noses, wide grins and eyes like full stops, and they are almost always in transit — an escalator carriage of commuters beneath a London Underground sign, a wizard in a red cone hat, a woman absorbed by her phone while a man beams past her.

What makes the flatness work is the discipline of the palette. Red, teal, grey and pale green, applied without a single gradient, so the compositions read as pattern before they read as scene. It is a graphic voice that survives being shrunk to a thumbnail — more or less the test these days — and it never looks like an accident.

More of his work: elliotkruszynski.co.uk.