The Rebel Within
Above are pop art illustrations of two protagonists from a known anime RPG video game, Persona 5. On the left is a persona known as Arsene and on the right is the owner and misunderstood trickster of the persona known as Joker. Both illustrations were created using only four Pantone colors such as black, gray, lighter gray, and red with the exclusion of white. All of which are the representational colors that make Persona 5 and its characters such as these two graphically unique.
Firstly, I sketched Joker, a framed high school student in a cruel society, in Procreate using an ink tool. After doing so, I transferred the image to Adobe Illustrator and vectorized it for the purpose of removing the pixelated lines and smoothing them in a clear up close view.
Next, I repeatedly sketched in Procreate but of Joker's persona, Arsene. With this, I also made use of Procreate's ink tool and transferred the image to vectorize on Adobe Illustrator afterwards.
On Adobe Illustrator, I used the painting tool to apply four Pantone colors as listed: Pantone 1797 Red for Joker's background, Arsene's clothing and face; Pantone 412 Black for Joker's hair, shading, Arsene's hat and face shading; Pantone 425 Gray for Joker's coat and eyes, Arsene's back ground and coat shading; Pantone 423 Light Gray for Joker's shirt, Arsene's clothing shading, and Arsene's face. With white not being considered a Pantone color, it greatly helped apply better quality to Arsene's clothing and Joker's face.
Lastly, to add a pop art and comic-like effect to the illustrations, I used Illustrator's pen tool and created cropped stars on the remaining free spaces. For Joker, I used black ink lines given that black mixed with red makes the image pop out and for Arsene, I used white ink lines to help the gray background pop out as well.
Thank you for viewing!
