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

Some Older Pieces of Mine

The next few posts are just pictures of things I’ve done in the past before this crazy AP Art course came along, so bear with me. This particular post will show drawings and paintings from my freshman and sophomore years.

However, the first piece is the weird exception to the rule: I think I did it when I was around ten years old, I’m not sure. I was bored one day and decided to paint with watercolors, and this image came into my head. Will it hang in a museum or other prestigious exhibit with (one day) my other pieces? Probably not. But I found this piece in a notebook a few years ago when I really started getting serious about art and it just inspires me so much. It helps me to keep going if I get stuck on a sketch or I hit a roadblock with a painting. So there you have it:

The next one is from freshman year (2009-2010). It is a watercolor painting of a butterfly, so I have creatively named it “Watercolor Butterfly.” I know it’s not perfect, but considering I was a puny little freshman at the time, I’m proud of it:

Moving on to sophomore year (2010-2011), here’s a drawing of an autumn tree for a typography assignment: “Fall Text Tree.” If you look closely, you can see that the entire drawing is made of letters of words like fall, autumn, wind, etc. I really like it and want to do more typography soon:

Next, I participated in the Deborah Heart Challenge and Art Competition both sophomore and junior years, and this challenge’s only requirement was that the piece contain a human heart. I made a heart out of cardboard and tried to make it look like it was put together with things like zippers and chains and stuff like that. “Broken Heart”

One of my favorite pieces of all time, this is called, “I’m Spying on You.” I love working with pen and ink and making extremely fine details and intricate designs. This work had three inspirations: Harry Clarke, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland:

Here’s a piece I made with oil pastel and one GIANT piece of butcher paper. I had to incorporate the human skeleton, muscle, and skin somehow, so I used sign language to spell the word “Free” with hands:

Another watercolor piece, this is just a nice landscape with a rainbow sunset and blue and purple flowers:

Ever heard the phrase, “Music is the soundtrack of my life?” Well, guess what-it’s true. This piece proves it. “Music = Life:”

Finally, I ended sophomore year with a bang with this self-portrait. I just gridded the paper and drew designs in the square and around myself. This IS my favorite piece I’ve done so far:

That's it for my earlier pieces. The next post is all junior year, everyone's FAVORITE year of high school (yeah, right)