Anton Dobay drew enthusiastically and almost daily. He concentrated on small-format works and the materials pencil, colored pencil and crayon. The use of bold, often luminous colors is characteristic of his work. He drew motifs from life and from memory, drew over newspaper clippings or used reproductions of paintings as source material. A 1565 painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder served as the inspiration for his After Brueghel (Gloomy Day). Dobay adopted some of the compositional elements, but chose a palette of colors that was very much his own: Instead of the “gloomy” tones of brown, green and ochre permeating the original, cheerful pastel tones dominate in his drawing. This independent work is carried out with short, dynamic strokes placed close to one another – a style of drawing characteristic of his early work. Dobay’s adaptation of a Dante Alighieri portrait in three-quarter profile in Untitled exemplifies a later phase, in which both the colorfulness and the density of the now longer strokes had increased. In colored-pencil drawings from the same period, the figures often feature bold contours; although the colors have now been placed on top of one another in multiple layers, the artist succeeded in permitting every single one to remain visible, leading to an almost shimmering effect.