Zoomed Shoe

Artist Statement: 

To choose my artwork I knew I wanted to choose the zoom that wasn't the most detailed one with the most lines, but also not the least detailed one with very few lines. This is how I landed on the middle zoom. After completing my art I also noticed that I liked how my artwork looked turned horizontally instead of vertically so that's what I did. 

For my artwork, I decided on watercolor paper because I knew I wanted to use watercolor in the background to cover any white space. I chose this size because I also knew I wanted to do some sort of zentangle and doing a really large piece of just zentangles could take me forever. I also used a fine line sharpie to make the clean, precise lines. To go over the borders and larger zentangles I used a thicker Sharpie to add variety. 

For this piece I started with choosing my paper, I chose watercolor paper because I knew I wanted to use watercolors. Next, I used a graphite pencil to sketch out the lines from the zoomed shoe and make the border. After I made those lines I went over them with Sharpie to make them bolder. Then, I used watercolor to fill in all the spaces. I used purple, yellow, blue, green, red, and orange. After going over each section at least twice in order to make the color very bold I tried using colored pencil to add a little depth to the color. After a little bit, I realized this wasn't working how I wanted to and decided to move on. Next, I went right in with the fine-line Sharpie and began drawing the small circles. This took me a long time but since it was so repetitive it was very relaxing. After that, I continued to the stars and lines in the red and green areas. After completing those I realized it looks a little bit like a watermelon which I think is cute. Then, to get more inspiration I looked up zentangle designs and took some ideas from Google and I drew out semi-squiggly lines in the blue section to divide it and added a pattern to each of those small sections. I then moved on to the yellow section, which I think is my least favorite section because I think it looks empty compared to the others, and I started with the thicker Sharpie and started making bulls-eye type drawings. I started these with very symmetrical circles that I traced but then realized I didn't like the look of that and free-handed the rest, making them looser. After using the thick sharpie I went in with the fine-line sharpie again and added more squiggly circles and some dots. Finally, I moved on to my favorite section, the checkerboard section. To start, I initially just wanted to do cross-hatching and make little boxes, which I started doing but then I realized after I had all of my lines that I could make this more interesting and turn it into a checkerboard pattern. I didn't know how to draw a checkerboard actually so I looked up an image and realized it's a lot easier than it looks and I figured it out quite quickly.  After I figured it out I started filling in each of the individual squares making the pattern, which took me a long time, but once again was very repetitive so it got pretty relaxing. And then I was done!