Skullfinder's Art Page

https://www.deviantart.com/xxskullfinderxx/art/Mother-s-love-766875020

This is the cover I made for my Legend of Zelda fanfiction that I'm currently working on. Done with watercolors.

Here's the link to the DeviantArt page:

And if you want to check out the fanfic, here's a link to Quotev and Wattpad:

https://www.quotev.com/story/4582928/Identity-Legend-of-Zelda-Fanfic

https://my.w.tt/0rTtwi8TxQ

During this semester of constant drawing assignments, I was able to compare my drawings/projects as time passed. Personally, I believe that my drawing skills have gotten exponentially better. I was able to learn more about art and how even simplicity makes a beautiful picture, and I learned about my weakness in value and thought about how I could make it better. I also learned how experimentation can help tremendously, and how “going with the flow” of your mind helps to create an interesting composition (especially with color).

Drawing Takumi Usui (Sketchbook assignment #4) helped me to understand the simplicity of pictures that are considered “high quality” (of sorts). Compared to other assignments, I used only a few colors to create the entire picture, which surprised me. I honestly thought I would have to blend some colors to get the right... look to it. Not only was it the colors, but just the shape of his features surprised me. His ears and eyes were slightly off, and I realized that it made him that much more of an awesome character. What’s a character without some flaws? Despite the strangeness of it all, I was able to see how those two things came together to make a drawing that looked like official artwork from the original artist.

Although I still don’t have the right mindset to create good dark values, at least I know that I have difficulty with it. The representational drawing of the interacting wooden figure helped me to understand that I needed to work more on this. It was the drawing and collage project that helped me understand that it was with all types of value techniques, not just pressure-only. I hope I can fix this problem, and I believe if I continue to draw in the representational style, perhaps it will help me in adding value to other, non-representational art projects.

Every one of my assignments has helped me to experiment with different media, but two projects, in particular, are the most obvious in this. With the quote illustration (sketchbook assignment #5), I got to see how colored pencil, oil pastel, and Blick markers worked together to create odd visual effects. With the hallway project, I experimented with the oil pastels, soft pastels, paint, and charcoal to see how those created an interesting composition, especially when using the oil pastel to define the dried paint lines (from the paint that I used to create roses with). With experimentation, I’m able to see what looks good to me with something else, or compared to the entire picture, and if it doesn’t look good, there’s usually always a way to erase it. 

Letting intuition work the hand has seemed to work the best in nearly all cases with art. I learned this with the animal pattern project; despite not having come up with a sketch for this project, I let my instincts guide me in making the patterns. I know that I should’ve done a sketch for the project, but I couldn’t seem to think of the right patterns that would fit with the animal that I was working with and I was running out of time to come up with something. In any case, I was glad I was able to trust my instincts on this project and was able to produce something that looked good. I also really focused on this while working on the hallway project, and was able to see the difference between just day one and day two. The first day I was really thinking about where to put each shape, and it really just didn’t look very good by the end of that day. It probably would’ve looked better, had I have just let my intuition work. I learned that as soon as the second day ended since it was then I just let my mind wander and my hand work (which also ended up being therapeutic). 

Finished Drawing and Collage project (Triptych)

This was a thoughtful project for me. I thought about why I liked the background and came up with the idea that it’s kind of like a fuzzy background for a dream, like the undefined shapes that are sometimes in the peripheral vision. Then I made it in the dog’s point of view and used colors that only a dog could perceive in the background. 

I wish I had actually read through all of the directions the as soon as I started the sketches. Then I could’ve planned out my values better, and it wouldn’t have looked so messy in the final product.

Sketch for Drawing and Collage project (Triptych)

Powdered Graphite Self-portrait

This wasn’t my best work. I liked figuring out how to do the inverted shading (not sure if that’s what it’s called, but that’s what I’m calling it) and the small details that were really difficult to do. I definitely messed up on the face a lot, and by the third time I was ready to give up and leave myself looking like a zombie (I totally should have taken a picture then! It would’ve looked awesome!). But obviously I kept at it and tried as best as I could to stay proportional.

Photo “sketch” for my Powdered Graphite Self-Portrait