Beautiful Oops Drawing

This assignment was called Beautiful Oops. The main idea behind this was that you can make something beautiful out of a mistake, or an "oops." Before the assignment my teacher read us a book showing how any mistake in art can be turned around into something good. The teacher gave us each a mostly blank piece of paper with a few random drops of ink. From there we could take it where ever we wanted to, as long as we incorporated the drops of ink and the whole page was being used. I used the splotch, which looked like a shaft of a sword, to make a picture of a roman soldier looking down on a field.

This process started with the teacher immediately giving us a page of paper with ink splotches on it. I looked at the page from different angles and decided the splotch looked like a sword. At first I was going to make a drawing of a knight, but decided on a roman soldier instead. The first thing I did was lightly sketch the soldier. I had to do this a few times before I felt the proportions right. I'm glad the sword was in the middle, so I could apply the rule of thirds where I put the soldier on the right side of the page, so the soldier was in two thirds of the image. Once I was confident in how the sketch of the soldier looked I began to use sharpie to draw the outlines of the soldier's body and the background, which is a few hills. Then I used colored marker to color the soldier and the background. I tried to make the armor as realistic to real roman soldiers as possible. After coloring the picture I was finished with the project.

The reason I did a soldier in this picture was because the ink looked exactly like a sword, and that reminded me of knights, which I used to love as a kid. When I started drawing a knight I realized I wanted to do a roman soldier instead because I've always thought they've looked good, and I've seen many movies with them in them. I wanted to give the impression the soldier was looking down on a battle field so that was why I made him on a hill. The most challenging part was definitely making the proportions right. At first I made everything too big so it looked like the sword was a dagger but I eventually got the proportions correct. I'm most proud of how realistic the soldier looks. I like how he turned out considering I was using markers and sharpie. I think this shows how I'm strong at getting a start of an idea and being creative and building on it until I have a full picture.