She grew up playing with art and playing the Legend of Zelda video game series. Little did she realize her two passions would align during her junior year in college.

Dianna Sanchez, visual arts junior, is the recent winner of the Fan Art Challenge for The Legend of Zelda’s The Wind Waker held by Nintendo of America.

“It was commemorating the rerelease of an older Zelda game but in HD for their new platform the Wii U, and it was in conjunction with a traveling symphony right now that is doing all the music from the game series. They were holding a national contest to see art inspired by the Zelda game that they were releasing,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez said she learned about the contest through a friend a week before the deadline, as the contest was both advertised and based on Facebook. She worked for fifteen hours over a few days, dedicating her time to creating a winning piece.

50 art pieces were selected and showcased at the Symphony of the Goddesses in Seattle. Five out of those 50 were chosen for an art exhibit at the Symphony’s event, Sanchez being one of them.

Sanchez’s vision for her art piece was “old fairytales,” which is represented in the drawing’s black and white woodcut style with older characters and intricate designs.

“I sketched it out on paper many times to get the design right. And then I re-sketched the entire thing on the computer on Photoshop and then inked the whole thing on Photoshop,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez said she remembers playing The Legend of Zelda series when she was a child.

“I’ve been playing it since I was very little. The game that the art was for, I beat back in high school,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez said art has only recently been the focus of her studies. She changed her major from psychology to visual arts this year.

She really likes psychology, although “it is not really a creative field and there definitely are boxes that you have to put your thoughts into. I needed something that was more expressive but I like them both because they are both about connecting with people,” Sanchez said.

Christopher Deris, foundations coordinator for the visual arts department, said he believes Dianna’s award with Nintendo is an accomplishment that is representative of the kind of students that are involved within the Visual Arts department.

“It’s nice to see students who do have the talent, and the interest, and the engagement and that is sort of reflective in Dianna, just in the fact that she is going with her interest and then competing on this national level and then doing so well. It reflects highly on our program too, and that we attracting those students and we have those students here,” he said.

“To me, winning this contest meant so much because the Zelda series, and video games as a whole, inspired me to love art and stories before I even started going to school,” Sanchez said. “They taught me to love writing, reading, and drawing, and encouraged me to be a creative person. I see video games as very complex works of art, and being able to give back to the series and company that inspired me so much as a kid was a huge honor.”

Lauren Cutuli can be reached at [email protected]