With six schools competing in the 2022 Annual Student Art Show hosted by Coutts Museum, El Dorado High School brought home 12 awards.
Judged by a couple of Butler Community College students, awards were given to first through third places and an honorable mention. Rose Hill tied with El Dorado for 12 awards, Augusta had nine, and Circle had seven. Art Teacher Dustin Harris believes it to be one of their best showings.
“I felt students were gettin’ in it to win it a little bit more this year,” he said.
The majority of the students who competed had been working on their projects for three to four weeks. Harris said some were able to finish quicker than others.
“Some are done quicker, but that’s due to the material that they are using. It’s easier to use or more forgiving. Oil pastels are easier to lay down, whereas charcoal moves around more.”
Leah Kerschner was one of those who worked with charcoal. The junior said she creates surrealism a majority of the time in her projects. She won her category competition – Drawing: Charcoal, Pastels, and Crayons.
“You go for a certain feeling while doing it. I was going for frustration, so I made the background weird and the foreground calm in order to create that contrast,” Kerschner said. While Harris said this was his favorite work of hers, she would have preferred her reductive charcoal piece.
“I liked my anatomy and my contrast in that one much better,” she said. Kerschner competed her freshman year in the Mixed Media category, grabbing an Honorable Mention.
Mixed Media deals with a wider range of materials used to create a single piece. Cheyenne Jones placed second in this category with her piece of a ram skull and terra cotta pots and plants.
“I’d been drawing a ram skull for a few days before and decided I wanted to use that. Then I brought in the pots and plants because they’d be a good contrast,” the junior said.
Senior Abigail Schafer also competed in Mixed Media, and she won the category with her scarecrow creation.
“It’s a cartoon-ish strawberry scarecrow with green, swirly hair in the foreground. In the background, there is a small house and wheat field, and even further back there is a picture of a cowboy that I cut out of a magazine,” Schafer described.
She was inspired by a line art piece that Thompson showed her last semester. Using paper machete and acrylics, the senior tweaked parts in order to make it her own. Though the piece grabbed first place, she “didn’t like how she rendered the hat” on the scarecrow and thought she “could have done better”.
Looking back on the entire experience, Schafer would pass on one very important piece of advice.
“Use the hair dryer in the art room to make your paint dry faster. It’s oud, but don’t be afraid to disrupt class.”
Deloris Thompson, another art teacher at EHS, had several of her students choose people that they admired and draw them as an assignment. That assignment later became several students’ pieces for competition, including Jeffrey Hamm.
“I drew Melanie Martinez, an alternative singer, using just graphite,” he said. “I really enjoyed the shading part of it because it added depth to the drawing.”
As just a freshman, Hamm placed second in Drawing: Lead and Graphite. Reflecting on the project, he said that if he could go back and do it all over, he’d “do the face shape differently because I could have done it better.”
The projects can be viewed at Coutts Museum now through May 5 in the High School Exhibit.
El Dorado Results:
Jeffrey Hamm, 2nd in Drawing: Lead & Graphite
Leah Kerschner, 1st in Drawing: Charcoal, Pastels, and Crayon
Cheyenne Berzeny – 2nd in Drawing: Charcoal, Pastels, and Crayon
Briley Ferren – 3rd in Drawing: Charcoal, Pastels, and Crayon
Sofia Wood – 3rd in Drawing: Ink, Pen, Marker and Scratchboard
Devin Scott – Honorable Mention in Drawing: Ink, Pen, Marker and Scratchboard
Halee Payton – 1st in Painting: Watercolors
Abigail Schafer – 1st in Mixed Media
Cheyenne Jones – 2nd in Mixed Media
Toryn Moore – 3rd in Mixed Media
Makenzie Countryman – 3rd in Ceramic: Sculpture
Lilly Rogers – Honorable Mention in Ceramics: Functional