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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 (even though they weren't that good back then, I now realise). 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 just love so called “Rubber Reality Movies”. Rubber Reality Movies are psychological thriller, in which the main characters 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, because some of them weren't that good or even horrible.

This new website nonetheless contains some drawings from the year 2002 and onward which - in my mind - aren't proficient, 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.

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) ...that's 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 much more interesting (partly because of the facial hair, plus I think that the female expressions on pictures all look alike).

5) What I hate is drawing hair (which kind of contradicts itself with point no. 4). I find it very hard to make the hair look realistic, but since I love bearded men I just have to bite myself through it...

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

7) Other drawing supplies I use are: a kneaded eraser, blending sticks, a pencil sharpener, sandpaper to sharpen the blending sticks and 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 don’t get everything the way I want it to be...).

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 (not that there is a lot of figuring out to do.... just the background mostly).

10) One drawing takes me about 40 hours to finish. I know it's a lot, but I'm just a perfectionist.

11) I use reference pictures for my drawings, since I found out that drawing stuff from my mind doesn't work for me. But I started making some changes in the drawing so it isn't a "copy" of the reference picture.

12) I'm not selling my art! I could have sold a few of my drawings before, but I don't like parting with them!