James Jean, the award-winning Taiwanese-American illustrator and painter, was once best known to comic-book fans as the cover artist of Vertigo Comics’ long-running fantasy series Fables, as well as a handful of DC Comics superhero titles (including Batgirl and Green Arrow). But he’s also a painter whose work has been exhibited everywhere from New York’s Jack Tilton Gallery to Tokyo’s Hidari Zingaro Gallery—and now, movie buffs should know him from his poster art for three 2017 titles: Blade Runner 2049, Mother!, and The Shape of Water, the last of which expands into theaters nationwide on Friday. Jean’s romantic, surreal style is instantly recognizable; you can’t help but be drawn in by his idiosyncratic synthesis of influences, like influential Japanese painter Hokusai, and the collectives of artists that produced Soviet propaganda.

The posters for Mother! and The Shape of Water started out as pencil sketches, while the Blade Runner 2049 poster was made entirely digitally, using an iPad Pro’s Apple Pencil and the Procreate app. (Jean also used pencil sketches, promotional material, director Denis Villeneuve's prior films, and time-lapse photos for reference points.) His two character posters for Mother! were both hand-painted. “I’m really happy with how I used different media to achieve different moods and feelings,” Jean said during a phone interview earlier this week.

His vivid charcoal drawing for The Shape of Water is maybe the most impressive of these four recent works. Jean was given a few notes from director Guillermo del Toro, who personally asked Jean to make a poster for the film. But apart from del Toro’s suggestion of a “yin-yang”-like symbol to represent Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones’s respectively mute and monstrous lovers, Jean was free to develop his own concepts. The result of that creative freedom is especially remarkable considering how messy and imprecise charcoals tend to be.

By James Jean.

That being said: how is it possible that Jean’s sharp, vivid Shape of Water poster is an untouched charcoal drawing? Jean laughs when I ask if he re-did his drawing using Photoshop or iPad apps. In reality, he actually used nothing more sophisticated than erasers, a blending stump (a compressed roll of paper shaped into a point, used to precisely blend the charcoals), and his fingers. “The process is very similar to painting, more so than pencil drawing,” Jean explains.

Jean’s two Mother! posters conceal “easter egg”-like details. His execution of Darren Aronofsky’s vision in these images, which show Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem’s respective muse and poet characters, is remarkable—especially the Hebrew letters that Jean painted into the folds of Lawrence’s white dress.