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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!