Chicago-area sixth-grade artist’s winning entry from our student art contest will be a mural you can see at the Salt Shed

It also “allows me to get out some things that I have going on,” says the sixth-grader at Twin Groves Middle School in Buffalo Grove. “It gives me a little escape from the world.”

Soon, everyone will get to see a giant version of one of her latest creations, titled “All in Harmony,” a drawing she did in part digitally and in part by hand.

As the winner of a student art contest sponsored by the Chicago Sun-Times and media partners WBEZ and Vocalo, her prize is having her drawing turned into a sprawling mural that will be on display at the Salt Shed entertainment venue along the Chicago River on the North Side. The space was donated by Wintrust Bank.

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The mural, which will be going up soon, will be displayed for about two months.

Her drawing includes hands of different colors, with hearts centered in the palms, floating in the night sky above a globe on which the Chicago skyline is perched.

That’s in keeping with the theme of the contest, “Bringing Chicago’s Voices Together,” meant to celebrate diversity.

Lucy’s own words regarding her message: “I’m not sure how to put this, kind of we’re, like, different” but “the same.”

“The entire world can be really big and really tiny at the exact same time,” she says.

And she hopes people who see her drawing take inspiration from its message of togetherness.

She also takes away something else from it: a sense of accomplishment.

“The fact that I really did it is . . . wow,” she says.

Lucy says she wants others to see that they, too, can “do something epic and totally amazing and still be them, still be the person that did it.”

She heard about the art contest, which was open to students in elementary through high school across the Chicago region, from a teacher.

“She told us and the other people in the artist club, but it was Christmas break, holiday break, so I wasn’t paying attention to it,” Lucy says. “We got back from a little trip, and I said maybe I should read the fine print on this.”

She realized, “I only have two weeks” to submit an entry, “so I’ve got to hurry.

“I started with a pencil sketch,” she says. “The first sketch was the entire globe and the city on top, and that was basically what it was. Then I just randomly started adding things, and then I put it into an app I had on my iPad and started tracing it out and adding color and the effects and everything.

“Then, this one tiny issue came up, which was the dimensions, dimensions — completely wrong.”

That was because the rules of the contest said submissions needed to fit certain specifications so the winning image could be translated well into a mural, with the artwork enlarged and printed onto panels that will then be placed on an exterior wall at the Salt Shed. The final product will be at least 90 feet long.

Brian Ernst/Sun-Times

“So I had to start over completely,” Lucy says. “It was only a couple days’ setback, but still I crunched it. I got home from school, and that was the only thing I did. So I worked on it, and even during school a little bit.”

Start to finish, it took “maybe a week and a half,” she said.

Lucy, the second-oldest of four kids in her family, says she’s been into art for a long while.

“I‘ve taken art classes since first grade, but I only started getting good at the end of third grade,” she says. “That’s when I started taking it seriously.

“I generally stick to colored pencil, just random sketches and drawings and everything. Sometimes, I do it because I have nothing else to do.”

She loves horses and takes horseback-riding lessons a couple times a week in Hawthorn Woods.

Naturally, horses are one of her favorite subjects to draw.

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“I have no idea how many horses I draw in the average day,” she says. “They’re really big and strong animals, so they make you feel kind of safe. But they’re sophisticated. They’re not like a lot of other animals.”

One of Lucy’s horse drawings was published a year ago in a magazine for horse enthusiasts.

She also writes short stories, and one of them did well in another contest, through Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire.

Megan Holloway points to her daughter’s 1,000-word fiction submission and says, “Of course, there was a horse in the story.”

The first line of that story: “Adrian sighed deeply, as his horse plodded down the cobblestone streets of Trestleville.”

Later on, the horse gets a little more attention: “He dismounted and gave his horse, Sparrow, an absentminded pat, before tethering him to a post outside of the tavern door. Sparrow was a good boy, and probably didn’t need to be tethered, but it never hurt to be safe. Adrian cursed himself. All he could do anymore was play it safe. And he walked inside.”

Despite loving art, Lucy says she isn’t thinking she’ll be a professional artist when she’s older.

“Not really, no,” she says. “I’m pretty satisfied with what I’m doing now, sketching, hanging things up in my room, sculpting, going to art classes in my school.

“Being a professional artist, it sounds cool. It’s not really what I want to do.”

“Bringing up the horses, I was always kind of thinking about being a veterinarian, specifically one for horses, I feel like I owe them that.”

Click on the map below for a selection of Chicago-area murals