WORDS BY THE AUTHOR / My work is often driven by the love of translating my surroundings in a graphic way to paper. Playing basketball since young age has been influencing my work lately. Growing up in the 90s with movies like Space Jam, playing old basketball video games and watching Streetball highlight tapes, I sucked up the whole culture and aesthetic which came with it.
It’s fun connecting both of my passions without overthinking too much. It’s all play and keeps me in the flow of creating stuff. I’m also influenced by frame-by-frame animation and the way comics communicates, and I’m trying to transfer those attributes to other mediums. Currently, I like to experiment with AR (augmented reality) posters.
The flood of images that we process every day can be confusing and distracting. This might be the reason why I like to keep things clean and in order. I often set tight rules for myself and only have a few elements in my artwork, which helps with not getting lost.
Every piece is a new challenge of balancing the composition and the amount of details needed. Working in a minimalist fashion is really refreshing sometimes and helps me to focus on the important parts. It’s always challenging and fun reworking a shape over and over again, when every line matters.
The first sketches and observational drawings always happens on paper. This is my happy place where I collect all the stuff without any pressure and deform elements till I like them. Later on, I move to my iPad and work on the final linework and composition as well as the colour using the Procreate app. Working with paper textures helps with bringing back a slight natural feeling while working in digital.
BIO / Jonathan Hoffboll is a freelance Illustrator and occasional animator, living and working in Hamburg, Germany, while doing his master’s degree in Illustration at HAW Hamburg. He was born in 1989 in a small village in Germany near the Dutch border. As he claims, it felt kind of like living in a cultural desert so it took him a long time to figure out what he could do with this drawing thing.
