Jon Foster Study

Composition and story telling
The first thing I do whenever I try to analyze a piece of illustration I try to first zoom all the way out to get an idea of how the composition fits together as a bigger piece. Its said that a successful composition can be read from a distance, as if it is a book sitting on a shelf. The goal then is to draw that reader to that book with the cover so the book cover must have strong, big shapes When we zoom out to get a bigger picture of the image we see a few interesting ways in which Jon draws our eye around the piece.

The first thing I notice is that the wolf acts as an arrow circling around the bed with the female, pointing towards her. This connects the background image we see in the window with the midground image. The perspective in this piece feels correct but at the sametime it feels distorted as if it isnt real. This perspective gives it a eerie dream like feel to the illustration which is obviously the point.

Her dream seems to be invading her world as the backdrop outside almost feels like a painting that the wolf is coming out of. She knew something was coming from her in her dream and we see this evident in the rosary beads laying next to her. On the table alcohol sits, clearly this incident of her dreams has stressed her out as she tries to bury the stress with her drinking.



Focal point
Our focal point is the dynamic between the wolf and the woman laying in the bed. This is where Jon wants us to look and he accomplishes this in a variety of ways. For one the wolf wraps around her pointing at her like an arrow. There is a similar pointing in a zig zag motion up her body from the bottom bedpost rest to her as we follow her legs upwards. The folds of the cloth all around her legs all point upwards to her as well.

Notice the color of the wolf and the color of her hair are similar and that her hair makes a similar swooshing angle pointing towards her face from the opposite side of her.

Value 
Most of the values we see here are grouped accordingly. I did not number them this time but we can see the darkest values are in really 3 places, the back end of the wolf, her hair and the shadow casted on the floor from the bed spread. These uphold the light greys of the piece into one shape that sits directly in our view. There are other lighter shades of value at play in the background but they are not lighter than her face, which actually goes into a white.

These highlights on her face are the only white, even though the moon in the back might look white, it is only because of where it is placed next to other values that it has lost its edges to that makes it look that way. However the moon itself is a 3 on the value scale (go here to my previous post about numbering the value scale).

The other midrange values and values closer to dark fit themselves appropriately around the page. He does this by giving a value, a core value you could say to each individual thing in the environment. For example the wood has a certain value to it that is not repeated elsewhere.

Silhouette
We get a strong silhouette from the whole piece here with her body splayed out holding a rosary bead, what she is doing is easily readable and we see the bedframe as a great way to frame where our eye should go both from the top and bottom

Patterns and rhythm
We notice a host of different patterns throughout the piece, whether it is in the fur of the wolf, to the patterns on the wall to the notches that go up and then down on the top of the bedpost and are arranged in a single line on the bottom of the bedpost. These patterns feel very dreamlike, we see them in the quilt, in the fur of the wolf, patterns on the wall, and the wavey van gogh like sky. He manages to work in patterns and repetition into every thing in the piece actually.


Color
He seems to use primarily a purple green and yellow palette in this piece and I deduced this by first color picking the shadow colors in the figure which tells me what the base of the colors would be even though he does step away from these colors. If we look at her closely we will see her skin is tinted purple with some gray greens as shadows. We see this same color scheme in the purple of the floor, dresser, wolf, her hair and the background. All of which are either purple or greenish tinted. He saves the colors that would contrast to these two colors for the lighter values he uses to place the figure on.

These lighter values are a different color than the green but he decided that what he would do is move the color warmer to contrast against the cool colors of the night sky behind her bringing her forward by moving the green to a light grey yellow. All the other purple and reds here are deep and warm with only the shadows on her and the sky being cool, this adds to the contrast between the two areas of the piece.

You could also say that the orangish yellow colors of the burning building in the background are to connect the background colors to the foreground bedpost and they all swirl downwards to point at her.