Toni Infante analysis

This Dororo piece from Toni caught my eye on his gumroad and I wanted to review the video and take some notes about some of the things I noticed and what I would like to incorporate into my own work.

1) It feels both like a drawing and a painting at the same time

At first I didnt realize it but while watching the gumroad I noticed that although he does a sketch layer of pencils, he does not actually keep the line art in the final piece. Instead we see the shapes are drawn very distinctively but there is only the suggestion of line in the hard shapes and the way he plays with light and dark tones to push the forms forward.

2) He uses references for every element of his piece

In his gumroad he also provides a brief breakdown of the process and lists coming up with a large image board that contains color reference, folklore reference, and other artists for reference including Zee Chin who I analyzed the last time I posted. 

When we look at the references we can then pick apart and see how he bounces off other's ideas to do something different  and unique.

3) His composition is easily read

After breaking down the image in line art he then breaks it down into three values then employs different colors in each value structure. 

The Value, Composition and Color connection

Right away we notice a few things about the piece just by looking at it. We see that the lightest part of the image would be on the highlight that is hitting the sword from an off camera top down lighting scheme. This cuts out the silhouette of his sword, arm, hair and adds some dimension to the body in 3d space as well as the figures close enough to him to be hit by this light while at the same time the rest of the figures in space sit back in darker midtone values that act as  a holder for the more dynamic pose our figure is in. It sets the stage for the drama of his pose. 

For the compositional elements we see every individual element from the bones of the claws on the bottom left to the horns on the guy on the right, the hand on the guy above him and the head of the demon above him all have their pointiest end of the shapes pointing down towards him. There is a nice touch with the sword on his belt also swooping upwards to point at the two figures faces, the shape of the sword directly pushes out of the eye of the demon on the right connecting these shapes together.

What makes the whole scene pop even more is that the figures in the foreground along with dororo are all in midtones while the background and the light shapes are the most saturated colors in the whole scene. We see the colors of things shift as they go further back into the image. For example we see the tentacle grabbing his leg in our foreground which ties the mid and foreground together but it also ties the background together because he see it go off into the distance and as it does it becomes redder as it goes away from us. 

We also see this in the wolf behind him we see that the bottom end of the figure is rendered in greyer reds as it goes down and as we get to the detail of the face he begins to bring in cooler grey yellows to render the details of the face, as if touches of the light are hitting the face but not much.

Perspective. 

What we see here is a simple perspective breakdown of the image. From the angle we are looking at we can deduce this as 1 point perspective with the figures main limbs coming out towards us at an angle. in order to find the perspective of an image you have to first lay down a cross at the feet, done here in purple, to let us know where the feet would be sitting in 3d space. This points us back to the vanishing point. Here we can see that we are actually looking down at the figure in space from a higher position thus the horizon line sits high on the page, this is a good tip for making an image feel dynamic in its perspective without having to use a super complicated perspective.