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About Arthawk

Hi, my name is Franziska. I finished the Liceo artistico (a secondary school of art) in the summer of 2008 and am now studying Psychology at the University of Zurich.

My passion obviously lies in drawing portraits. I started drawing faces long before I entered the Liceo Artistico around the time when the first of the trilogy of “The Lord of the Rings” came out. I felt the constant urge to keep on drawing faces. I slowly improved my drawings skills by looking at other people’s artwork and regarding my own work very critically. My goal is that every drawing is better that the one I did before.

As you may have noticed, I’m a movie freak! I especially love so called “Rubber Reality Movies”. Rubber Reality Movies are psychological thriller in which the main character's mind is (becoming) detached from reality and the line between imagination and reality blurs, forming complex interactions like a spider's web and making the movie more difficult to understand. Movies like these influence not only me but also my art!


About the drawings on this website:

I had a website before this one which displayed a lot more of my drawings than this one does. I decided that I wouldn't transfer all of those drawings to my new website.

This new website nonetheless contains some drawings from the year 2002 and onward which - in my mind - aren't that good, but I wanted to reveal the progress I went through over the years and show that everybody can do better if they just keep on doing what they love and are passionate about.

So, if you like what I do please keep on checking out this website because I'll be adding onto the galleries and tutorials.

Thanks for watching!

 

 

12 things about my art:

1) I've been drawing ever since I can remember.

2) I love to draw faces, most of all eyes ...

3) ... which is why I always draw the eyes first before anything (as you can see in my tutorial section). I use them to navigate throughout the rest of the image.

4) I don't like to draw women... I find the male face far more interesting!

5) What I hate is drawing hair. I find it hard to make it look realistic, so most of the time I just bite my way through it and hope for the best.

6) I use graphite pencils for the majority of my drawings. The dark parts are done with soft pencils (6B-9B), the light parts with HB mechanical pencil (0.5mm), 2B and 3B.

7) Other drawing supplies I use: kneaded eraser, blending sticks, pencil sharpener, sandpaper to sharpen the blending sticks, white fine grain paper (not the regular printer paper!).

8) I don’t work with the grid method in order to get the proportions right. It’s a practise thing, and I still have a lot to learn.

9) I never do sketches before a drawing. Either I know from the start how I want the drawing to turn out or I figure things out while drawing.

10) One drawing (on DIN A4 paper) takes me about 30-40 hours to finish. I know it's a lot, but I'm just a perfectionist. Smaller drawings usually take between 2 and 10 hours, depending on the amount of details and the choice of reference picture.

11) I use reference pictures for my drawings, since drawing stuff from my mind doesn't work for me.

12) I'm not selling my art! Partly because I simply can't part with it, partly because taking money for something I'm intrinsically motivated to do might take away the joy and passion in doing it.