Scotts Valley High School students surprised first and third graders at Brook Knoll Elementary with hand-made 3-D Monster art projects on Tuesday.
The students embarked upon the Monster Project about two months ago, when SVHS Art Teacher Judy Cogan reached out to the school.
“So she emails us and says would anyone like to do an art project with the high schoolers,” said Brook Knoll Elementary First Grade Teacher Charlie Rice, adding that he jumped at the opportunity immediately.
First and third grade students drew a picture of a monster, then handed them over to the SVHS art students who turned them into three dimensional monster sculptures.
Third grade teacher Kari Thornley said that the elementary students didn’t know much beyond that they were drawing monsters for the high school students and so it was a surprise when they showed up with their 3-D interpretations.
“This is a national program, its called the Monster Project and they have a website themonsterproject.com and what they do is connect young children with either professional artists or older art students in high schools or collages,” Cogan said.
SVHS junior Marissa Shaffer, used 9-year-old Neel Yarlagadda’s drawing titled “Eye balls the fluff ball,” to create a stuffed monster covered in eyes.
“All the kids drew pictures of their monsters and then we created them and it was a lot of fun going through the process of trying to bring the piece of paper to life, actually making something out of it.”
Yarlagadda said that his picture was originally composed of colored pencil and crayon.
“My drawling was to make him able to see almost anything in his path and of course eat with also seeing the food inside his body,” he explained, pointing to the eyeballs in the creature’s mouth. “It’s completely eye-balled.”
There were 36 high school art students from three different art classes that were involved in the project, Shaffer said.
“They had a choice of ceramic, plaster, or they could make a stuffed animal,” Cogan explained.
SVHS Senior Sarah Reyes, used 9-year-old Alex Shen’s drawing to create a large colorful papier-mache dragon with a wood base.
“Mine was a dragon and I thought it was actually really impressive for a third-grader, it had shading and dimension.”
Dominique Parrish, another SVHS senior, recreated third-grader Trinity Szoke’s drawing of a long tailed creature.
“Mine was a lash beard long tail, I am not exactly sure what it was, but it had horns, and it had red eyes, and a brown body and I made it out of paper maché as well,” Parrish said.
Eric Johnson, parent of first-grader Reed Johnson, said that he hopes the project will return for a second year.
“(The project) is super inspiring and I think its wonderful to get the littler kids with the older kids, you get them both to see what the other one is doing,” Johnson said.
Cogan said that there are lots of ways to connect older students with younger ones, and that this project is the perfect way to do so.
“I am going to do this again next year, I think it’s an awesome way to collaborate with other schools in the district and so I am really excited to keep it going.”
