Mark Borgions’ (founder of HandMade Monsters) award-winning illustrations, titled “Looming Danger (1-3),” capture the cinematic suspense of Alfred Hitchcock’s later American films. Rooted in a personal passion for classic Hollywood and influenced by widescreen aesthetics, Mark transforms familiar narratives into illustrations that balance angular design with an evocative color palette reminiscent of 50s and 60s movie stock. Through his meticulously crafted vector work and textured digital painting, he invites viewers to reconsider the delicate interplay between character and actor, storytelling and style.
By: Mark Borgions, Designer & Founder, HandMade Monsters
“Looming Danger (1-3)” is a series of three giclée prints that were part of the Golden Age of Hollywood group show at Gallery 1988 in LA. It’s three illustrations depicting lead characters from Alfred Hitchcock’s American films—Roger Thornhill from North by Northwest, Madeleine Elster from Vertigo, and Melanie Daniels from The Birds.
Having to choose from Hollywood’s golden decades, it wasn’t hard for me to land on Hitchcock. I’m a huge fan of his movies, and to me, some of his best storytelling is in his later commercial successes. I could have easily done a series of five or six, and maybe I’ll get back to it in the near future.
The prints have a couple of design elements that are quite common in my work. First is the wide aspect ratio of the images. Having grown up watching old spaghetti Westerns in full Cinemascope and dubbed in German, using hardly a third of the 4:3 television tube, I developed a love for the widescreen format. There is a strong storytelling aspect to very wide (or very tall, for that matter) images and a very cinematic one, too. I love playing with that. A similar argument goes for the color treatment, which is very influenced by fifties and sixties movie stock.
I also have a fascination with very angular design. It is one of the reasons why I mostly use vector shapes with very few curving lines. That angularity is most visible in the character design, which always has a balance between the character and the actor. To me, the character is the most important by far. Motivation and story are more important than likeness, but I do try to work on that, too. It is mainly for that reason that I started an online series of character illustrations called “#twocolorcharacter,” wherein I train myself in minimal design choice vs readability of character and pose.
These illustrations were converted straight to vector (Illustrator). The vectors are brought into Corel Painter, where I paint the grain details. All were comped and processed in Photoshop and printed on an Epson SureColor printer.
Mark Borgions (1967) received a graphic design degree at Sint Lucas Antwerpen in 1989. He built a career working on major brands and campaigns, further developing his design, typography, and motion skills. In 2002, he started HandMade Monsters and shifted his emphasis to illustration. In his homeland of Belgium, he co-authors a bestselling series of audio-plays-packaged-in-picture books. To date, he has illustrated over 30 children’s books. To an international audience, he is best known for his more adult-oriented pop culture work. He has worked with major entertainment brands and is a regular force in the Los Angeles pop gallery art scene. He is represented by Lemonade Illustration Agency.
