Minimalist Illustration: How to Simplify Without Losing It

Minimalist illustration has a reputation for being the easy style. Fewer objects, flat colors, no rendering. Then you try to draw a plant with three lines and it reads as nothing at all, and you learn the truth: when a composition has only a handful of elements, every one of them is exposed.

Sandra Staub, the Swiss illustrator who teaches the Minimalist Art Bundle on Twotap, has built a career on this style, including a commissioned series for UBS, the biggest bank in Switzerland. Across her lessons she keeps returning to one governing rule, and everything else in this post is a technique for obeying it.

Always try and break down any object to its most characteristic elements, to focus on representing those elements as accurately as possible and to leave out whatever is not essential.

Sandra Staub, "Simplifying Objects," Minimalist Art Bundle

How many leaves does a monstera need?

Staub's demonstration of the rule starts with a monstera plant. The reference photo has a bunch of leaves. She asks the only question that matters: how many do you need to draw for the viewer to understand what it is? For a monstera, the answer is one, because the split leaf shape is so characteristic that a single leaf carries the identification. Everything past one leaf is a purely aesthetic decision, and there she has a preference worth stealing: odd numbers. Three or five leaves, because odd counts are more intriguing to the eye than even ones.

Two more habits from the same lesson. She avoids overlapping the leaves, so each one stays whole and recognizable, and, as a bonus, the composition needs no shadows to explain what is in front of what. And she keeps each leaf on its own layer so the arrangement stays movable until the end.

For flowers she splits her approach in two. Asymmetrical flowers, like a bird of paradise, she draws freehand from reference, stylizing the petals and asking which parts can go while the flower stays recognizable. Symmetrical flowers, tulips, roses, peonies, she rebuilds from geometry instead: a circle for the tulip's base, mirrored lines for the outer petals, one curved line for the petal in the middle. The same object-to-geometry translation works on faces, moths, birds, or a coffee maker. It is a way of seeing, not a flower trick.

Spend embarrassing amounts of time on the shape

Staub admits that for years she treated one of her habits as a flaw. Starting a new piece, she deletes and redraws the same line over and over, polishing how a curve flows, how two lines meet, how an ending tapers, details she assumed nobody would notice. Her conclusion after a decade: this quirk is the actual secret of the style.

The logic follows from the reduction rule. If your illustration contains six objects instead of sixty, each object carries ten times the weight, so the perfect shape of every single one is worth real time. In practice she builds objects from basic geometric shapes wherever possible, uses her app's line-smoothing and shape-snapping assists to keep circles and straight edges clean (she works in Procreate, but every serious drawing app has equivalents), and leans on a symmetry assist for arches and frames, switching it off deliberately when a composition needs asymmetrical details.

Her brush criteria are worth writing down: little to no texture, little to no transparency, and little to no ductus, her term for how much the stroke changes with pen pressure. A clean, even stroke gives crisp borders and full control, and texture can always be added later on its own layer. She keeps a small amount of ductus on purpose, to preserve a human touch, and points out that illustrators she admires rock the same style with rougher, inkier brushes. The criteria are a starting point, not a law. Her final detail habit: zoom into every joint and line ending and round it out. In a six-object illustration, viewers do end up looking at corners.

Skip perspective on purpose

The UBS commission forced Staub past single-object compositions into full scenes, offices and buildings, and her research into how other minimalist illustrators handle depth produced two rules that she says solved it completely.

One: minimalist illustration is very often characterized by the absence of perspective. All objects in a scene sit on one horizontal line. Two: as a consequence, every object is drawn in one of three views, frontal, lateral, or three-quarter.

Her chair example makes it concrete. A chair drawn frontally without perspective is nearly unreadable, just stacked rectangles. The same chair in lateral view is instantly a chair, which is why she used that view constantly in the bank series. The three-quarter view is the interesting cheat: she draws the lateral view, then appends a compressed frontal view to its side, giving the illusion of depth while ignoring vanishing points entirely, and keeping the legs on that single horizontal line. Her guidance on when to use it: save three-quarter for the protagonist of a composition with few elements, and keep supporting objects frontal or lateral, because every added angle costs legibility.

Outline versus fill: the balancing tool

The last principle is the one Staub calls her final secret, and it is the cheapest to apply. In her compositions, some objects get a solid color fill and some remain outline only. Filled objects read as heavier and pull the eye; outlined objects recede and reward a second look. So the main object of the illustration gets the fill, and supportive or decorative elements stay as outlines, quietly steering the viewer instead of shouting.

Two clarifications from her lesson. By outline she means the same object without its fill, not a black comic-style contour around a filled shape; those contour lines are exactly the kind of non-essential element the style removes. And the principle compounds with color, since a filled object that contrasts the background strongly attracts even more attention than the fill alone.

Her testing workflow costs one click: draw the outline version first, duplicate the layer as a hidden backup, fill areas on the copy, and toggle between the two to compare. Balance stops being a matter of taste you either have or lack, and becomes something you check.

The rule behind the rules

Reduce to characteristic elements. Perfect the few shapes that remain. Flatten the perspective. Let fills carry the emphasis. Each technique is the same idea applied at a different level: nothing in the frame that is not doing work, and everything that remains done properly. Staub's own closing advice cuts against treating any of it as dogma: make up your own rules, and if wonky lines are your quirk, channel that instead. The style rewards discipline, not a specific temperament.

These four lessons come from the second course of the Minimalist Art Bundle on twotap.art, where Sandra Staub also teaches color palettes and symbolism, composition for calm, shadows with intention, and a complete client commission from brief to print files. If simplifying is the part of illustration you want to get genuinely good at, her bundle is the deepest treatment of it we host.