Many students are involved in art programs across the district, ranging from elementary school art classes to IB art here on campus, and find that these courses amplify their talents. As the school year moved forward, the art students were able to showcase their works in Artfest, an annual event held in the Silver Cafeteria.

“Artfest is our district wide art show,” art teacher Kimberley Marshall said. “Every single art teacher in the district comes and they put artwork by their students up.”

Members of the community were welcome to visit Artfest, which helped to create a positive environment for those whose artwork was displayed. Senior CJ Bryan, who had his artwork showcased, details how the environment of Artfest looked as a student.

“Artfest was a fun, interesting, and inviting place,” Bryan said. “The atmosphere was welcoming and the people were content by the art.”

Students work year round on pieces that have the potential to get submitted to Artfest, but ultimately it’s the teacher’s decision in what gets showcased. Junior Miana Soto details what goes into making a piece for the showcase.

“[The art teacher] tells us what kind of art to make, like a portrait or a landscape,” Soto said. “Once we have that, we can do whatever we want. It just has to be an original piece or it has to be from a picture that we’ve taken ourselves in order for it to be entered into any competition.”

Throughout the year, art teachers keep a repertoire of the students’ work that can be showcased at Artfest. For Marshall, the selection of pieces is ongoing and is finalized right before Artfest occurs.

“As we go along through our school year, we will pull aside projects that we feel were really successful for each of the different [focuses] that we did,” Marshall said. “There might be five or six different kinds of projects in the workshop. We don’t really prep them, we just pick the ones that the students were most successful with.”

Before students can start working on a piece, they have to find inspiration to create something great. Sophomore Jessica Triana said that, through inspiration, the artwork becomes a part of herself.

“My inspiration begins with my imagination because your artwork is basically a part of you,” Triana said.

The students who participate in Artfest take heart in the art program and find that participating in it has helped them to find a calling in life.

“The art program has impacted my life as to making me want to go further in the program,” Triana said. “[I have] actually considered going further [into art] after high school as well.”

At the showcase, students were able to see different aspects of art from other artists all over the community. Freshman Blanca Luna said that taking note on methods used in different pieces helps to make her artwork better in the future.

“[At Artfest, I saw] the variety of styles and methods on how a piece was created,” Luna said. “[For example], the symmetrical design station was fun and creative.”

From talking to spectators of Artfest, Marshall was able to see how members of the community reacted to seeing the different artwork from all age groups.

“[Visitors] love seeing all the little kids’ work and they are amazed at how advanced some of it is,” Marshall said. “It might be a second grader submitting something but it may look like a middle school kid did. They are just amazed at how wonderful and how talented these kids are, because there is some really wonderful work there.”

Artfest allows students to see a multitude of different pieces and different styles of art. In turn, they were able to see how one theme of artwork can be interpreted in so many ways. For Bryan, he was able to take this knowledge and apply it to future pieces of his.

“[Art is] not definite,” Bryan said. “That is to say, there is not any one way to do things.”