On Thursday, the students of period 9 AP Studio Art competed in an art battle where each artist was given 20 minutes to paint an image of their choice.

“We pick our own paints and our own compositions. The winner gets their own handmade trophy made by Mr. Fry,” senior Hannah Ellinger said. “This will help us prepare for May when we must make collegiate-level work in a short amount of time.”

The competition was a learning experience where students were challenged with a time crunch. 

“If you do fast paintings like this, it’s really good for your art skills because you quickly grasp how things look in real life,” senior Kathryn Freeland said. “You have space to mess up because you’ll see it looks wrong and you’ll do it again and again.”Being able to paint under pressure is crucial to succeeding in the AP art world. Most of the students are used to this, but it doesn’t stop them from wanting to practice more.

“If I had more time, I would have thought it over a lot more than I did in the time that was given,” senior Ava Meyer said. “I would have kept trying and trying until it was perfect in my eyes.”

Along with the little amount of time, there were many other challenges for the students including controlling the paint, knowing what to paint and using the properties of the paint.

“Acrylic paint dries super fast, but not fast enough, so it’s really annoying to paint on wet paint,” Freeland said. “Usually you wait for it to dry, but you can’t do that right now.”

Sometimes, solving one issue would create another.

“Getting the paint to spread how I want it to means that I have to use a lot of water, which meant that my art was super liquidy,” senior Genevieve Konijisky said. “It’s really easy to mess it up.”

Though the world of art may be a challenging one, these students find love in expressing themselves.

“I like being able to show my own perspective of the world,” Freeland said.