My Naruto Eye of Sharingan with Zentangle Frame

This piece was a challenge I set myself, to incorporate Zentangle into a drawing in a way that would be obvious but not intrusive. My finished product is influenced by Cildo Meireles (1948 to date) . Meireles was born in Brazil and is a conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor.  He creates a lot of his work as installations and in response to the political oppression in Brazil.  

The work I saw was on display in Room 6 of the Tate Modern and was called ‘Babel’. It was a circular installation made up of hundreds of analogue radios stacked in layers and switched on to various stations and frequencies. The radios were all switched on their lowest audible volume and so created a continuous chaos of seemingly meaningless sound. Meireles succeeded in making his installation look like 'one' tower even though the components were different and individual in their own right. This creation of one artwork out of many different individual art pieces made me wonder how I could use a completely different idea - Zentangle - as part of a different medium to create ‘one’ piece with my work. I eventually decided upon creating a Zentangle ‘frame’ around my work. I played about with different geometric designs but the one I used is called an 'interweave' pattern and creates an effect of mystery; it doesn't quite have beginnings and it doesn't quite have endings.  I then highlighted the pattern in gel pens to create a distinct but complimentary effect with the colour of the pointillism in the sharingan picture. I did not use any mathematical instruments to create the Zentangle as I wanted it to correspond with the imperfect strokes of my freehand drawing.

               

I decided to draw a character from Naruto called Shisui Uchiha’s eyes. He is my favourite character in the anime because I can see myself in him.    To show this in my artwork, I used a mirror to draw my eye in pointillism and in felt-tip pen.

  I then coloured the eye so that it had ‘sharingan’, an eye feature special to the Uchiha clan.

Here, I started to add more colour around the eyelids with Copic Marker and I added dimension to the eye using pencil.

I drew the other eye and began to add Shisui’s facial features, e.g. lines near the eyelids. I started to draw a crown above the eye in  yellow pencil so that I could see how the crown looked with the picture, without it being dominant. I added the crown to show the sharingan’s superiority.

I liked the way that the crown looked so I went over it in felt-tip pen and made the points for the skin denser to make the colour more saturated.

   In my finished product (my main image), I used a Zentangle weave pattern to create a separate, but complimentary frame for my picture.