Tooth Wu Analysis

 

Composition and storytelling 

This powerful piece by Tooth Wu has a great silhouette and gesture to it. To start with we can see that the pose our character is in dynamic because we have a turning of the hip that leans his right shoulder and arm towards us with the left knee coming towards us. This is a common way to make a pose dynamic by contrasting the shoulder and legs coming out towards us. One arm is thrown back in perspective away from us while the other is coming out towards us. 

What also gives it the dynamic feel is the use of horizontals and force in the gesture. The heads tied to his sword in the background have a lot of force to them as they swing outwards away from his body as if he is leaping into motion and are also diagonally going away from his body. The swords also have diagonal lines to them and even frame the main focal point which is his body and head. Behind him is the sword that cuts in the opposite diagonal direction than his other two swords. We also see a general sway of the clothes on his lower body swaying to the right. The two swords on his right also help with this. 

Ambient Occlusion

Tooth Wu's style is punctuated by heavy blacks in the darkest regions of the shadows that then stretch and thin out into linework as they move away from the darkest shadows. We can see an example of this in this grayscale piece below. Notice how each layers is segmented from the others often with heavy black lines in the shadows that give the impression of that 3d feel.  

Above we can see that even in his early stage work he is thinking of these hard blacks as a way to help him find and define the silhouette. 

Value 

Breaking this piece down into purely values we can see how he organizes each layer of this characters clothing into a different value and then adds gradations of value throughout the different layers to communicate the light source. Notice that the light source coming from above highlights our main focal point but the ground of bodies he stands on stay in relatively close value range from one element to the next. Like I mentioned the pants, fur that is wrapped around him, his skin, his swords and the other elements all generally fall into certain value ranges depending on how specular that particular thing is. 

Here I decided to bring in the value scale from Sycra and go through and guess which value is at each point shown here and then go back and correct myself. I got a few right but also a few wrong, and made the mistake of noticing some values as lighter than they really are. This is a useful way to get acquainted with how they organize the values in a piece.

Overall the piece exists in the grays and there seems to be a dichotomy between light greys of the fur around him and the darker grays of his undergarment and the sword and hat behind him with his skin tone existing somewhere inbetween these two. 

Color

Finally we have color, I originally drew colors from the palette and tried correcting myself but I decided that I would try this tip from Walid Feghali by dropping the piece into the mosiac filter and getting a good idea of what the colors are here since this gives me a palette to look at. 

First thing I notice is this really helps since you can see it as just colors rather than as the thing he draws itself. The colors seem to exist mostly in the warm range and even though some of them dont feel particularly warm they mostly exist in the muted browns and grays of green and brown. We can again bisect the piece and see a good amount of the colors on his shoulder are muted greens and browns and this carries through in his fur on the bottom of his legs. 

The ground almost completely exists in the brown reds and gets more saturated into pinks or reds as it gets further away from the center of the piece. We can also see this on the blades themselves since they carry the color difference. We see a strong contrast between the red going around his shoulder and see it as a highlight that stands out from the rest of the piece and is coupled alongside the only cool dark colors we see which is the hair on his head. We see some of this cool color behind him as well on the blade but its clear the idea was to create contrasting color shapes nex to each other with the bright red and the dark blue both of which sandwich around our focal point which is his face.