Awanqi study

Composition

First thing I noticed about this piece is the use of straight lines, diagonals and the one major curved line that intersects with both the dragon and the knight. In this breakdown here I took the time to draw out all of the straight and diagonal lines and what I see is that the spear from St. George as he strikes and the left most spear stuck in the dragon form a triangular shape that falls off the page if you were to follow their trajectory down. Or you could even say the background straight and curved wall would act as the bottom of the triangle, regardless the triangular composition conveys strength and that is exactly what is being depicted here as St. George slays the dragon.

There are numerous straight lines that run down the page keeping our eye from wandering too far off the focal point. He uses both these straights and the few curves we find at the top of the page and the middle to add a sense of contrast and movement. In blue I noted the movement our eye follows throughout the piece, here we can see the curve hof the wing is positioned perfectly to overlap with the background ribbon to then push our eye downward into the figure and to also follow the curve up to the dragon. 

I also took the time to break down the dark shapes of the background to the right to show us a good example of negative space in a drawing. Notice he has unity while still providing variety. We see that variety in the bottom of the page that contrasts with the rest of the image because while the rest of the image deals with large shapes this bottom left side has a lot of irregular shapes in the form of the petals the dragon is bleeding and the tears in the fabric hanging down. Also its important to notice these lines from the fabric become irregular in their width, condition and the strength of the lines going down. 

Value 

The value structure in this piece I find really appealing because of the heavy contrast between the black background and the dragon depicted in high tone values that contrast against St George and all the other details in the image. Interesting shapes also become apparent like for example  we see he takes the cloth hanging from the figure and creates a really interesting shape that falls off the page. We can also see he does a good job of grouping values together with the skulls on the bottom and roses basically making two different shapes. 

We also notice that the torn fabric hanging down, which might also be metaphorical for the blood of the dragon is a darker value tone than the two on either side of him. 

Color

What i really like about the colors and specifically the colors on the dragon is the subtle change of color. I remember Marco Bucci said that if you keep your colors around the same value range you can really play around with what colors are working in your image. The dragons color scheme is great example of this because we see very high value rendering of the scales, and upon closer examination we see that he is juxtaposing two colors next to one another. In the light shadows of the dragon we see a high key red that is fairly saturated compared to the scales themselves which are rendered in a bluish white or purplish white color. Here I did another breakdown of matching the color palette along with an example of simultaneous contrast in the colors of the background and the orangish color in the background.

You can find more of Awanqi's work here.