Handlettering

Happy New Year!
I hope you all had a great start into 2017!

Just a little drawing tutorial for today (it has nothing to do with the new year.. sorry):

A few days ago I watched some viedeos about hand lettering on youtube and due to the endless number of awesome quotes I have as pins on pinterest I thought I should give it a try!

To come up with a plan for a picture is actually quite easy.
Of course I first chose a quote, wrote it down and then I underlined what words are important.
Then I decided the arrangement of all the words and once I was also sure about that I choose a font for each word (or groups of words). I used only capital or just bigger letters for important words.
In the end I added some accents – the line with a word in the middle and the frame. There are a lot more, for example arrows, flags or flowers. It depends on personal preference how many you want to use. I like the quotes to be rather „plain“.
Once I had a plan I made a bigger scetch on squared paper – that´s the easiest way to get everything clean and even.

Then I copied the scetch on transparent paper. My trick to make sure all the words are exactly in the middle of the paper: draw a verticle line parting the paper in the middle, messure all the words/ word groups on your scetch and again mark the middle of each, when you copy it you just have to make sure that the lines on the scetch exacty cover the line on the transparent paper.
When you´re happy with the result choose a paper and copy everything.
I used pastell paper so that I could add further colorful accents.

Suprisingly, to make it look neat and clean costs some time and effort but I had a lot of fun! I did a second one and that´s not gonna be my last one either.

Berserk – Slan

Last month I watched the anime Berserk and since then I´m obsessed with it! I also watched the 3 films (2 times each), read the manga (over 250 chapters, it´s not finished yet) and of course started with the new anime. I´m really in love with the story (even though it´s so depressing and brutal) and I just HAD TO draw a character out of it. And after the eclipse (part of the story) I immediately knew who: Slan.
She´s not a main character but I just love the way she first appears in the eclipse!

I used this picture from pinterest as a reference but made some little changes. For example, I added those lines in her „hair“ so that it looks like cracked up soil and I drew her dark „demon eyes“. In the manga she is depicted with both, human eyes (with a small iris) and those „demon eyes“ (without a pupil).

I always make a scetch for the bigger (DIN A3) pictures.

Then I shaded the body and „hair“ and used an eraser to clean up all the edges.

I used pencils (H, B2) on pastel paper and tissues to blend.

Overall, I´m qite pleased with how it turned out. Even though there is something that bothers me about the anatomy but I´m not sure what exactly (maybe her head is a bit too big …?).

Hope you like it!

Verzerrte Welt

Hey!

This post is about a picture I wanted to draw for quite a long time. I got the idea for it while listening to the ost Verzerrte Welt (translates as distorted world in English) from the anime Tokyo Ghoul (which you should definitely watch (anime) and listen to (soundtrack) if you haven´t already).

While listening to the ost I always imagined a woman with light hair and eyes putting on a black hood and a mask, walking down a narrow street at night.
I also thought of and listened to 30 seconds to mars (band), especially their songs This is war and Vox populi while drawing and added their symbol, the triad (the necklace), to the picture.

Naruto – Sasuke´s Amaterasu

Naruto is one of the animes that I would call a masterpiece (at least if you take out the fillers) and it has a special importance for me.
No other anime has been „by my side“ for so long – I started to watch it when I was in elementary school, when I was a teenager they stopped showing new episodes on TV and I also stopped watching it for a really long time. When I first went to conventions I saw all those Naruto cosplayers and that made me realise how much I missed the series. Finally, during my A levels I started to re-watch Naruto from the very first episode on. Now I´m 20 and I still watch it!

After this 10 years journey I thought the anime should be worth me sitting down, drawing a picture!
So I drew my favorit character which is Sasuke. I bet a lot of people don´t like him but I just can´t help myself! I love him since I was a kid SPOILER ALERT: even if he turns into a villain, even if he wants to destroy Konoha! I´m just like Naruto…

 

There´s a similar picture of Sasuke in the anime, I just colorized it different.
By the way: Amaterasu is a god in shintoism, it´s the goddess of the sun. All of the big sharingan attacks are named after shinto gods.
I know some gods of shintoism and I´m always excited about the next sharingan attack and who it´s named after!

Wheel of Life

Hello!

On this blog I already talked about my two drawings Time and Time´s prisoner that deal with a similar subject and are like a project. Now I finished another artwork for this project.

It shows some circles with symbols between them and each row stands for things that are important for me in my life.

 

The last two rows are taken from the contract sign of the character Sebastian from my second favorit anime Black Butler. If you are a frequent reader of my blog you probably noticed that anime is a great passion of mine.

Next are the Fibonacci numbers. They are connected to the golden ratio which is a concept I think is really interesting. It´s a ratio that appears often in geometry and a lot of ancient mathematics studied it.
What I find most fascinating is that it also appears in a lot of patterns in nature and some people even said it´s like a signature that god put in his creation.
The ratio is also considered aestethically pleasing (it´s also called the golden proportion) and can be found in architecture and a lot of paintings.

The row after that contains symbols of my favorit band 30 seconds to mars (the circle with the four arrows (don´t know if it has a name…) and the glyphics).

The next rows are similar to the clock in my artwork TIME. I added the zodiac signs; for me they stand for personel traits, some people believe that there is a connection between ones personality and ones zodiac sign.

The innermost circle contains a compass rose which is a symbol for traveling. The last years I realised how much I love to travel and that a travel around the world is my lifetime dream.
A compass also shows the „right way“, for me it stands for finding ones way (in life.)

Right in the middle fo all the circles is ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail. It´s a symbol with a lot of different meanings, it stands for cyclitality, eternal recreation of oneself (like the phoenix) or being at one with oneself.

I´m really happy with how the image in my head came to life but I have to admit that this kinda looks like the symbol or sign of some weird sect…
Either way, I hope you like it!

Dreamcatcher

After over a month of completely no activity on this blog I finally came to upload a post again. Actually, I felt quite creative that month and worked on different projects but for some reason (I don´t know) I didn´t felt like writing about them…
But fortunately that changed today and I want to blog about my last artwork!

The idea for it isn´t really new, I saw a lot of similar paintings but either way I wanted to do my own version of it.

I really like how it turned out! Its a lot more colorful and has a different style than my other paintings. The theme dreamcatcher also reminds me of my dream to travel and the plans I made for traveling this year.

Time´s prisoner

Two whole months ago I posted my artwork TIME and wrote that I have two pictures for this theme. I never found the time to post the second picture and I thought I should definitely caught up on that.

The two pictures are very different from each other because I actually never planned them as a project. When I planned this picture I wanted to draw something lolita-ish (Lolita – japanese fashionstyle). The dress looks a bit like gothic lolita but only a little.
I also thought about baroque art and the themes time, death and transcience which played a big role in the era. That´s why I added the hourglass, the skull and the clock. You can find the hourglass and the clock in both pictures so they are also the link between them.
At that point the picture still looked a bit empty. I remembered the motif of the red thread that is part of a lot of anime related artwork and added it. One could interpret it as being time´s prisoner.

For this picture I used watercolour, acrylic paint and pastels (to shade around the edges).

Hope you like it!