All year, Sage Hill’s art students have been working on a variety of projects, some of which will soon be showcased at the April 13 art exhibition.

    “I am excited about every level of artwork coming out of each course,” Donna Okamura, visual arts teacher, said. “I love building up to the Spring Exhibition.  You can see each student’s work and it is a celebration of everything that they have accomplished.”

    Among recent projects have been animal paintings in Art II, printmaking in Art Survey and house drawings in Art I which the artists are creating in accordance with details given to them by another student.

    Okamura’s AP and Art Lab classes, meanwhile, have been working on individual and personally designed portfolios or assignments.

“The most rewarding part about taking the Art Lab Independent Study class is the freedom I have to paint whatever subject matter I find interesting, making the class more personal for me,” senior Maia Coffey said. “It’s really nice to be able to create what you want while still receiving feedback from peers that help improve your skills.”

    In contrast with Art Lab, where students are given the freedom to pursue individual projects using whatever medium or topic they like, AP students have projects that they must complete by May. These projects entail a portfolio consisting of 24 pieces, 12 of which are based around a specific theme and the other 12 which are more broad-ranging.

Some of the themes this year include senior Marina Wild’s emphasis on powerf

ul and impactful women, Lynn Fong’s concentration on cartooning, Puja Patel’s theme of figs and junior MacKenna Strohmeier’s focus on portraits.

“My main goal for my concentration in AP art was to show raw emotions through my portraits and have the emotions have an effect on the viewers looking at them,” Strohmeier said. “As an actress, I study emotions, so I had a vivid picture in my head of what I wanted my portraits to look like.”

For Art Lab, this year’s projects have encompassed 3-D papier-mâché figures, digital art and water colors.

Aside from completing work in their art classes, many visual arts students have also entered competitions outside of school, such as the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, where Fong received a gold award in digital art and cartooning, senior Abby McGuire was given silver awards in painting and Wild earned an honorable mention for this year’s AP portfolio.

“I always encourage students to submit work to local contests such as the Multicultural Fair Poster Contest, Color it Orange, O.C. Airport, Imagination Celebration and especially the Scholastic Arts contest,” Okamura said. “Students have won awards in all of the above contests in the past. I am really proud of their successes.”

Other art pieces done this year in the Art I, Art II and Art Survey classes are Day of the Dead masks, metal relief sculptures, draped fabric as well as gesture drawings and blind contours.

Over the past two semesters, students have built skills regarding color theory, linear perspective, contour drawings and the use of mediums like oil paints along with watercolors.

As the year comes to an end, Okamura is looking forward to putting her students’ work on display for the April art exhibition, Spring at Sage as well as the influx of underclassmen expected to enter higher level art classes nex

t year.

“I am most excited about our annual Art Reception because it is all about Sage students,” Okamura said. “I am also excited about the new talent being groomed for the following year.  The seminars/trips that I participate in or design are mostly art oriented so I am always excited about Spring at Sage and the opportunity to get out of the classroom or to design something different that isn’t offered in our curriculum.”

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