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?