I’m being very facetious in saying that he just ‘runs things through a few filters’, but honestly, the style isn’t hard to replicate.
Take photo into Photoshop, reduce to B&W, use Levels to reduce it to basic shapes and shadows.
Touch up shadows and shapes until the outline and shadows look clean and simple and good.
Bring into Illustrator, outline into vector art, play with bezier curves until it looks good.
Apply blue-and-red color scheme.
It’s not as easy as clicking some buttons – I don’t envy SF drawing in the delicate curves in the women’s hair in these posters, and that’s sensitively done – but when doing art in such a specific style and color scheme is all you do, it’s definitely easier than approaching every project with a blank slate. “Well, let’s see, how should I solve this design problem… Russian Constructivist protest poster style? DONE!”
Yeah, but he’s kind of like Michael Schwab. Not the most labor- or skill-intensive art style out there, but the myriad of cheap rip-offs attest that doing it well isn’t quite as easy as it looks.
I happened to wind up at the Shepard Fairey exhibition in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2009. It featured a bunch of HOPE prints, and the original stencils. I had chills! Truly one of the coolest things I’ve encountered in a gallery setting.
RE: Filters making art - holy shit, there are some filters and apps out there that make me want to hang myself. Artsy image in a push of a button. Granted not as good as humans overall, but better than most humans.
Re: Noam - the hope style works better with certain KINDS of photos. Something with a fair amount of contrast is going to work better, and if someone took a different photo of the guy it would have come out looking better.
BRUTE! aka Aidan Hughes has a similar style, though it is less photographic, more wood cutty with high contrast. Though his stuff has gotten more detailed with the use of more digital illustration.
RE: Knockofffs - not that it matters for knock offs. Certainly using Illustrator or even hand tracing a photo, tweaking the shapes of shadows, and deciding what to enhance and ignore is going to result in a better image than an app/filter most of the time. But for a meme or a cafe press mug, something like that is close enough. You won’t be selling $50 prints of it, but it still gets the job done.
In middle school art, one of our projects was to do a four-tone monochromatic self-portrait. This is very similar, except that one of the tones of the blue is actually red.
Sums it up for me as well. He didn’t do anything complex or even novel, but he did something that worked out very well for him. Maybe the effortless style behind HOPE is why it was such a popular image.
