Digital Mixed Media Blog and Miscellaneous Sketches

Senior year has been pretty crazy so far-but fun!! Three art classes is the most awesome thing I could have asked for this year. And in one of the art classes, Digital Mixed Media, I had to make ANOTHER blog! I seem to be starting a collection of collections of art, if that makes sense. The new blog is over on the right side with the other links, but here’s a link up front in case you get lost:

http://abbymcgrathdigital.blogspot.com/

In AP Art this week, me and my friends er.... dismantled (that’s the most pleasant way of putting it) some traditional mannequins that artists use for figure drawing and hot-glued them into a murder scene, I mean, still life that we will draw parts of in charcoal. It’s going to be pretty interesting when it comes out. I’ll post the pictures once it gets done.

Just so that this post is not completely pointless, I think I’ll post some recent doodads from my sketchbook.

I’ve been trying to write a fantasy book for a month now, and I’ve found I understand my characters better if I draw them (plus, awesome illustration practice). This is my protagonist Lynna the Artful Dragon who creates pictures with her special multi-colored fire:

This is her friend she meets along the way, Finley the would-be princess that’s getting chased by her cousin Farold who wants to take over the world:

Finley’s got a friend too: Yara, the last fairy in Chromania who rules over all the butterflies:

Another “friend” of Finley’s, this is Vian, Farold’s BFF who used to go out with Finley but now is chasing her down for his bro. (I only started this one yesterday)

In addition to illustrations for a potential new book, I also have been working on some celebrity portraits. Though it’s only about ½ done, here’s a drawing of one of my all time favorite people, Barbra Streisand:

This portrait of Arwen from Lord of the Rings, unlike the one of Babs, is actually done:

And then these are just some random things that don’t belong in any real category:

Mannequin still life pictures coming soon to a blog near you!! 

New Progress Before School Starts

One short day, and I’m back in school! How should I spend my last day of summer vacation? Blogging of course!

Here’s a piece that I’ve been meaning to post but just keep forgetting about. I did this in my watercolor class that I took over the summer.

 I’m not 100% certain on my art-tiara-portrait thing as I was in the last post, but I think I’ll post the new pictures anyway, just to keep it up-to-date.

I have been working on a new piece for the past week or so, and I think it came out really nicely. It’s a sketch that I made sophomore year of what I call the “Creative Bubble” In a nutshell, it’s the doodles that float around in this super crazy mind on paper in bubble form. When I first thought of it in tenth grade I had started it on a giant canvas, but it turned out to be a disaster. So this summer I thought I’d try it again, this time on black paper with pastels, and I think it looks totally awesome.

Here’s the original sketch:

Then what I like to call the skeleton of the piece (as you can see, some stuff in the bubble changed since the original sketch)

The first bits of color:

½ done with the color:

½ done with the piece:

Yes, that is my cat. Natasha was helping me throughout this project, so it seems only fair I give her a little credit.

Lightening the color:

Close-Ups:

Final Piece:

I know everyone else my age would kill me for saying this, but I really want to go back to school.

Gotta get back to Hogwarts, gotta get back to school... (A Very Potter Musical)

Art Princess Progress

The art-tiara-princess-portrait-thing (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not good with titles) is coming along. I’ve gone out of my sketchbook and into the good 16X20 paper, and I’d guess that I’m about 1/3 of the way done.

Here’s a close-up of the portrait. I’m still not 100% percent sure that the shading and stuff is right, though.

Now here’s an outline of the tiara and the portrait. It’s not a particularly girly tiara, just the way I like it.

After I had it all drawn, I didn’t know what I would do for a background, because I had decided to use ink for the tiara and not color, so I was asking myself, Should I make it a rainbow, more ink, a solid color, what? Then an idea just came to me: a rainbow emanating from the tiara itself. You can sort of see it in this picture of the revised sketch:

The tiara fully drawn out in pencil:

The tiara fully inked in:

What the whole piece looks like now:

I’m anxious to see how this turns out!

Art Princess Sketches

Lately, I've been trying to work a lot on portraits lately in the beautiful yet twisted thing I call my sketchbook. I came up with an idea that I want to use for AP Art, but I’m not entirely sure which media to use.

I started with this sketch using a photo of myself, not really knowing what I’d do with it, but it ended up looking so cool that I knew I had to use it for something.

Then I fooled with some lines and made this weird sketch of a girl with no face. 

As weird as it is, it helped inspire the tiara in that first sketch. The tiara shown here is made of art and music stuff, and in my sketch book, I’m in the process of inking in the details.

I know that I need to do myself in pencil or charcoal or something of that nature to show that I can do portraits well and I can draw people pretty realistically and all that stuff that’s good in fine arts. It’s the tiara that’s bugging me: ink would be intricate and dark, which, in addition to making it look awesome, is kind of my signature media at this point. However, I’m tempted to do the tiara in colored pencil, since I’d really be able to emphasize that it is an artist’s tiara, especially since the whole concept of the piece is sort of my coronation into the art world. I don’t know what to do.

I got awesome feedback from that Monochromatic Still Life. I only need to make a tiny change.
One last thing- I’ve decided to start sketching song lyrics again, which should prove, at the very least, interesting.

Live long and prosper (you cannot tell, but I’m giving you the Vulcan handshake).

Rainbow Trees!!!!!

While looking up stuff about the new Hobbit movie that’s coming out soon (what, you didn’t already know I’m a fantasy/sci-fi nerd?), I found an article on these really amazing trees. They’re called Rainbow Eucalyptus Trees, AKA Mindanao Gum, and they’re only in Hawaii. I swear, they look painted, they’re so cool. I may work something like these trees into my sketchbook and see what I can come up with. After all, the trees inspired Peter Jackson so much that he’s made some similar trees that they’ll use as Mirkwood in The Hobbit. Here’s some pictures:

Monochromatic Still Life

You’ve waited, you’ve wondered, and at last the moment has arrived: my first AP Art piece is complete! Every good artist needs to have at least one still life under her belt, no matter how boring still lives can get. Well, I wanted to be sure that this particular still life was anything but boring. My art teacher had told me to do something monochromatic, a fancy word for the same color. So, here it is: a 16X20 in, purple-gray charcoal paper, purple pastel/charcoal still life!

Here’s a picture of the still life itself (I know it’s kind of blurry, but hey, I’m not taking AP Photography, give me a break). In case you couldn’t tell from the picture, the still life consists of 1) a flower (which, coincidentally, is purple in real life), a pencil, and a paintbrush in a glass vase that has beads inside, 2) an origami butterfly that my artistic aunt made for me, and 3) a glass figure of an owl that was left to me by my grandmother.

These next few pictures just show some sketches and then the process itself of the piece. When I was going through the pictures on my laptop, it was kind of cool to watch a pencil drawing get filled in purple little by little.

Initial Sketch:

Colored Sketch:

Started Pencil Drawing On Good Paper:

Beginning of the Flower (way harder than I thought it was going to be cause of the green part underneath):

Flower, Pencil, and Paintbrush (this got really screwed up at one point because my dad MOVED my still life, but I think it came out pretty well):

Vase:

Owl (approximately when I was half done the entire drawing):

Beginning of the Butterfly (there were a LOT of flowers on that dang butterfly.... ):

Butterfly (...but it still looks cool):

And the whole thing one more time!

I would hazard a guess that this piece took a week to complete: the earliest date on these pictures is July 28^th, and I finished today, August 3^rd, so a week would be about right.

What do you think?

More Past Pieces: Junior Year

Here’s all my stuff from junior year (2011-2012), when it starts to get interesting. This was probably my worst year of high school, and the fact that I couldn’t take art that year sure didn’t help any. Still, I managed to whip out some interesting sketches and pieces that I’m happy to post on here.

First, I had to write an original fairy tale for English class, and mine was about a dragon raised by a human girl. After that, I realized that dragons are one of my favorite things (besides brown paper packages tied up with strings, of course ;) Anyway, I just got really into drawing them in my sketchbook, so here are some of my best ones:

P.S.-I used a couple for illustration for my friend’s story!

Enough dragons for now. Here’s a pen and ink drawing I did on graph paper based on art:

In my school’s National Art Honor Society, we host coffee houses to raise money and showcase our members’ talent. For the first Thanksgiving themed coffee house, I entered this pastel drawing called, “Thanks to Self-Expression:”

Once again, I put a piece in for the Deborah Heart Challenge, called “Music Comes From the Heart:”

For a Valentine’s themed coffee house (ugh, Valentine’s Day), I did this mixed media piece based on a lyric from Taylor Swift’s song “Back to December” – “You Gave Me Roses And I Left Them There To Die:”

In March I went to a Graphic Design class at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, which was totally awesome. I learned a lot about negative space and what attracts and repels the human eye. Our first project was to create a logotype of our name using Illustrator, and this is what I came up with:

The second major project in my Graphic Design class was to create a collage about our identity inspired by surrealism. I used some of my older drawings, some paint, a photo of myself, and Photoshop to create “An Artist’s Mind:”

When the coolest class I’ve ever taken ended, I went back to my sketchbook and just did some different things, like this blue butterfly and a girl:

And I also re-worked that fabulously awful watercolor painting I did of a blue moon so that it had a much more artistic message. I’m planning to create a larger acrylic or oil painting of it eventually, once I get more practice:

I couldn’t resist making this Dragon Girl that lives in my head:

For the last NAHS coffee house with a Renaissance theme, I decided to use some juxtaposition (a fancy word I learned in my Graphic Design class that just means to put things next to each other) and create some real “Jedi Knights:”

Ever since that piece, I’ve just been practicing some portraits in my sketchbook of random celebrities. For example, this is part of a famous shot from Casablanca, the greatest movie of all time, of the character Ilsa played by Ingrid Bergman:

This one is Sharon den Adel, lead singer of the amazing band Within Temptation:

And, in case you didn’t know, this is Emma Watson, my favorite celebrity ever:

That’s all my best stuff up on this blog, so from this moment on, it’s AP Art all the way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!