Ten visual arts students travelled to Spring Hill High School on May 2 to win third place in the annual Frontier League art show. The competition consisted of both on-site contents and a judged contest on submitted artwork. This year’s theme was “Art Wars: The Last Frontier,” and many of those competitions were themed accordingly.

The on-site contests included sidewalk chalk, assemblage, scholars bowl and wheel-throwing. Schools gained certain amounts of points depending on how they placed in those competitions. In addition, each school was allowed to bring in 25 pieces of art to be judged for points.

“The work that happened ahead of time wasn’t necessarily done with the intent of taking it to the league art show, but having a high expectation of projects that are completed tends to produce quality work,” said art teacher Tim Mispagel. “Then, my task is to limit the number of pieces to only 25, which is a very difficult task because there is a tremendous amount of high quality work being generated in our visual arts program.”

Not only were countless hours spent making the actual artwork, but on making the work look presentable as well.

“As far as making it [the art] presentable, [it requires] hours and hours of time that goes into cutting the mats, labelling everything, listing all the work out and organizing it to take to the show,” Mispagel said.

Senior Emily Davis attended the league competition for the first time this year and got the opportunity to participate in trivia and gain some knowledge from a professional artist.

“I went to go see a graphic design presentation,” Davis said. “It was so fun. Her [the speaker’s] name was Meredith Shay and she was just so chill and she works at AMC as a brand designer. She told us what she does there and she showed us stuff she did when she was a senior in high school for graphic design.”

Several of the students, including Davis, who attended or submitted work to the competition received ribbons for their pieces.

Senior Brooke Portz received a Best In Show ribbon for her drawing of silverware.

“It feels really good to be recognized for all the hard work that I do,” Portz said. “I worked really hard for this.”

Portz’s hard work involved many hours spent on the drawing.

“It was technically supposed to be a winter break assignment, but it took me a little longer than that,” Portz said. “I finished it I think in the beginning of April.”

This is DHS’s last Frontier League art competition as the school transfers into a new league: the United Kansas Conference.

“To my knowledge, the ‘eague that is forming with us in it is not going to have a league art competition, so that would be something that I personally would probably be looking to try to initiate as we get into the new league,” Mispagel said.

Mispagel was happy with the result of third place this year.

“It was awesome because last year we didn’t make the top three,” Mispagel said. “Last year was the first time we didn’t make the top three in probably six or seven years, so to come back and earn an award was really exciting.”