Image Breakdown – KahoOkashii

Image Breakdown – KahoOkashii

E no sekai – ART WORLD
KahoOkashii
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http://kahookashii.deviantart.com/

Image break down
Image break down aims to look at strong pieces of art and critically evaluate what makes them visually captivating. Today we look at E no sekai – ART WORLD by KahoOkashii

What we have here is an image of a manga style girl riding a broom. The concept is simple but the exectution is quite impressive.

Fig. 1
Firstly lets look at the values on this piece. Image one shows the piece in grey scale. This is useful as it enables us to see areas of high contrast.

As we can see the sky appears extremely dark which serves to highlight the face. Through this the face is immediately a focal point. The next thing that attracts the attention of the viewer are the socks. Note how they are black against the white clouds. The socks also serve to highlight the legs and the perspective used by the artist. Notice the perspective on the entire character. By creating 2 focal points it forces the viewer to look around the image. The positioning the 2 main focal points is important. It ensures that no one part gets too much attention.

Fig. 2
Figure 2 shows us the image blurred. Blurring the image enables us to see the general shapes formed without getting distracted by detail.

Even at this level of blur we can still clearly make out the character and even to some extent what she is wearing. Here the contrast shows it’s importance as the legs and face would be lost if not for a dark sky. This makes the figure very powerful to the eye and instantly recognisable when the image is viewed at a distance or at a thumbnail size. This technique could result in this image getting clicks over other images. The legs more than anything else give an immediate indication of the light source and being as the legs are a focal point it draws the audience into this world very quickly. Remember the job of an illustrator is to make it as easy as possible for the audience to enter your characters world.

Fig. 3
Figure 3 shows the general composition of the piece.

Immediately noticeable is the triangle that is created by the character and the broom. Notice how much of the triangle is actually character as oppose to background. The space is used as efficiently as possible and the form is only broken to ensure a readable form.

Also notice the two focal points are placed at the corners of the triangle.

Lastly the majority of the triangle is reddish in hew (the character, clothes and even the broom have a red look to them) whilst the outside of the triangle is blue. This makes the main subject pop out of the background and ensures the image is instantly recognisable.

Figures 4 and 5 show the lines present with in the image.

Fig.4

 Fig.5

They follow the perspective extremely closely. Most of the lines on the left hand side follow the characters movement which emphasizes movement. The right side seem to go against the characters movement. Being as this area is significantly smaller than that of the left hand movement (only a quarter) we get an impression of speed. It is not an uncomfortable speed but it is fast.

Figure 6 shows us the foreground.

I have greyed out the rest of the image to show off the predominant foreground images in KahoOkashii’s image. Whilst the character is important the image would look flat without a little something to draw the viewer in. The foreground is used sparingly to ensure the image is not cluttered but enough of the foreground is used to give it an almost 3d feel to it. You can almost touch the paint buckets.

Everything in this image is carefully considered and an oblivious plan was made. Nothing seems out of place or obnoxious.

Be sure to check out the rest of KahoOkashii’s portfolio. Link