Every year, the art department submits their best pieces to be judged for the Scholastic Art Competition. This year, they entered 56 pieces and had 13 of them accepted. Even though this year’s number of pieces accepted was lower than last year with 20 awards and 2015 with 17 awards and one national winner, art teacher Paula Yoachim is still pleased with the results.

“You have to keep in mind, this is the only competition we do where you’re competing with the entire state,” Yoachim said. “There’s 4000 entries and they pick 1200 pieces of work, and so, it was quite an honor to be even part of it.”

Junior Marie Day received a silver key for her drawing titled “Nymph.”  Day originally created the piece for her self portrait project in Drawing I.

“Most people do the squished face against the glass, and I didn’t really like that, so I went home and staged my photo,” Day said.

At home, she put on a dress and head piece she made the previous year for Latin Convention along with makeup and fake eyelashes to get nymph look she was going for. It took between 20 and 30 different selfies to get the desired picture, and then another two to three weeks of going square by square to complete the project.

“We draw a grid on a piece of paper and then we grid our drawing, and it helps you see square by square what’s happening, because you miss things if you just draw the whole picture,” Day said.

“Nymph” is the first piece Day believes actually looks real and is the first piece she went for a contrast in values. Winning the silver key makes her more determined to keep up the level of quality in order to impress even more people.

“I took out one of my pieces from eighth grade, and I set them next to each other, and they’re totally different worlds,” Day said.

Sophomore Donnella Brown received a gold key for her mixed media piece titled “Inside.”  Mixed media means the artist used more than one medium in creating their piece. Brown’s piece incorporated both drawing and painting on wood.

“I really don’t like paint, so that was definitely a challenge,” Brown said.

Brown first started the piece when she was 13. She originally didn’t want to make it a color piece, but changed her mind due to suggestions from others.

“To be honest, I prefer things in black and white, but everybody kept telling me that the piece would be so much better in color, so i just tried it,” Brown said.

Senior Autumn Kaspar, who also won awards last year, received an honorable mention for her painting titled “Orpheum.”  She was inspired to create the piece when she sat in the highest balcony with a friend when she saw “Cinderella.”

“We could barely see the stage, but we could see the ceiling really well, so I was just taking pictures of it with a filter on my phone, and I thought that would make a nice painting,” Kaspar said.

Kaspar made it an oil painting because it was the medium she had been using for the better part of the year. “Orpheum” was one of three oil paintings she did at the beginning of the year because she didn’t like drawing with charcoal.

“I never do architecture or landscapes, so that was different and I started doing watercolors later, so it really has the most rich color out of anything I’ve done this year,” Kaspar said.

All 13 pieces that were accepted are in an exhibit at the Omaha Public Schools Teacher Administration Center building on 3215 Cuming Street through March 31. “Inside” and all other gold key winning pieces advanced to nationals, but none were awarded a medal.