Beautiful Oops

Be Not Afraid

4.5"-6"

Mixed media

I was inspired by the splotches that were already in india ink and I thought they looked kind of like eyeballs so I decided I would draw an angel just because I think they’re neat. It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just rad eyeballs and wings and stuff. I left the pencil in because I wanted it to look skrunkly and nasty (this is a good thing).

I used the paper provided, which was watercolor with three splotches of india ink on it. From there I sketched a drawing with a graphite pencil, then did the lines in a ballpoint pen I had at home. I used a metallic gold Sharpie to make the circle around the angel, and I think I used a black sharpie to do the other pupils of the eyes.

I thought a lot about ancient painters and how they made art while making this piece, and I also was very frustrated when my marker died halfway through. I wish some of the lines were a little smoother, but overall I think this piece looks fine. It’s mostly on the left side of the paper because that’s where the dots were, but I like it, it makes it seem almost like a fragment of a larger piece and the angel is looming. The rings and lines don’t make much sense, and they go through each other in places that couldn’t work in real life. They warp when out of eyesight and are incomprehensible to the human mind. I am a big brained young man with massive ideas and I am not self-aware. I based the stylized wings off of many different medieval angel paintings, as well as the wings of doves, since they’re supposed to be holy and pure I think. I used the gold Sharpie to make a metallic circle, because that’s something that happened a lot in medieval religious paintings, so I wanted to kinda copy that idea. The rest of it was just out of my little brain.