By Teresa Lopez.

At the AISD Invitational swim meet on Nov. 4,  art students decided to put their skills to the test by doing on-the-spot portraits for people attending the meet.

“If I’m being completely honest, it came about because at my wedding we had live artist sketching,” Coach Kelly Fuller said. “Then I started doing it in class and then I noticed some of the students liked to do the same thing and I’d thought it’d be cool to combine some of my art kids and then combine them at the swim meet.”

Senior Mya Gant, senior Hayle Burton and freshman Hollie Nowlan were so ecstatic to join together to get to experiment in a new area of live art

“We wanted to raise a cause, like for art and also just for fun to show other people that art can be different things,” Mya said. “It helped me to want to talk to people more about art because I didn’t know that there were that many people that were interested in art.”

The art portraits were $5 and they put 25% toward the swim booster club and the rest of the artists got to split the $200 they made. The portraits took about 15 minutes per drawing.

“I think something I wanted them to see is that they can apply their art to the real world and they can make money on it, ” Fuller said. “ This was kind of just a step of getting them comfortable.”

The girls have all been doing art since elementary school and Hayle shared she was wanting to do it in college.

“I plan on doing that as well where they can give me a random person they want me to draw or anything like that, similar to what we did at the swim meet, and I’ll use the money to help pay for college,” Burton said.

They all have different views on art but all share the same value of expressing themselves.

“My favorite thing is there’s no limit on what you can make,” Burton said. “You can add whatever you want to it and it will still be art in your own way.”

Hollie expressed a lot of gratitude and how art is “basically another language.”

 “Someone who never spoke a word of English could understand a painting by someone who spoke English and they can completely understand the meaning, the message, the feeling.”  Hollie said.

Other artists’ work are widely appreciated and give future artist ideas and inspiration.

“My favorite thing about art is that I like to see other artists’ artwork because that inspires me,” Mya said.

Through this experience the girls got to connect and share their love for art with others.

“I would love to do this again and show Abilene high hospitality,” Hollie shared.