Scholastic Gold Key Winners Share Their Art Process

SHS artists excelled at the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards this year, earning a total of 118 awards!

The contest includes 16 art and writing categories, including photography, digital art, and painting. The regional level features three types of awards: a Gold Key, a Silver Key, and an Honorable Mention.

Pieces that win a Gold Key are automatically submitted to nationals, where they can potentially even win a Gold or Silver Medal. But what exactly goes into making these Gold Key-winning pieces?

(Yixin Cao)

Yixin Cao, 9, won two Gold Keys for her digital art. Her first piece was influenced by sheep, a common Chinese symbol that is often associated with peace and prosperity. The second one was an “expression of the cycle of humanity and nature.”

Cao found it difficult to connect different parts of her digital art. “I did not know how to combine the [animals] in the picture without being abrupt,” she said. However, she was able to find a solution by “covering the body of the sheep with characters” in her first piece and having the fish cover part of the character’s body in her second.

Ava Andolina, 11, won a Gold Key for her painting “Binge in Technocolor,” which depicts all sorts of candies. Andolina admits that while she was inspired by the “fun bright colors of candy,” she also was inspired by her sweet tooth.

“The whole process from start to finish was much more time-consuming than most of the artwork I do—I spent more time painting each individual piece of candy than I expected, and most days I stayed after school to finish the gummy I was working on,” Andolina said.

The process wasn’t easy. Andolina started by hand-stretching her canvas—a first for her but something she enjoyed immensely. Then, she added each candy with acrylic paint, a challenging art medium to use because it dries so quickly.

But it was all worth it for her. “I loved seeing the composition come together,” Andolina remarks. “The best part was coloring in the shadows and watching it pop off the canvas with the added dimension … Overall, it was a fun experience.”

(Ava Andolina)

Amina Janybek, 12, won a Gold Key for a photo that “showcases a figure in a steamed shower, with the steam concealing their eyes but the rest of their face open.”

Janybek said this photo was not what she originally had planned but just came together at the end of her photoshoot. Once she had a plan in place, all Janybek had to do was “figure out the specific lighting I wanted and how I wanted to enhance [the photo] through editing.”

(Amina Janybek)

(Julia Li)

Julia Li, 11, won three Gold Keys as well: two for her Drawing & Illustration and one for her painting.

Her first drawing was made with colored pencils and a white gel pen and was inspired by her mom’s cooking. “Even though she isn’t a professional chef, it’s easy to taste the love in her food,” Li said. While making this drawing, Li noted it was difficult to “find a good balance between ‘colorful’ and ‘realistic.’”

Her second drawing depicted a “ghost with a human hand watering a plant,” also using colored pencil and a white gel pen. In this drawing, Li attempted to “bridge the gap” between the living and the deceased. “It is meant to be reflective of how our loved ones shape who we are, even after they pass away,” Li said.

Although Li didn’t encounter any major problems when creating this drawing, it took her the longest to make just because of all the small details.

Progress shots of Li’s painting

For her painting, Li decided to depict her dog using gouache, a versatile, water-based paint medium. Li picked her dog as her subject because she “wanted to bring attention to the ‘man’s best friend.’”

She modeled her painting off of Renaissance-era statues, aiming to illustrate her dog as “angelic” and “without flaw.”

Li put countless hours into bringing this art piece to fruition; she found it hard to make the shine of the dog’s eye look right, and she had to put “special attention” to every brush stroke of fur.

However, the true challenge for Li when creating her painting was adding texture, variety, and depth. “My dog has gray fur, but it would look a bit boring if I solely used colors on the greyscale,” Li said. “I had to learn how to integrate some unexpected colors such as purples, pinks, and yellows [as well] .. It took some trial and error, but I think I ended up with a satisfying result!”

The photo that won Cecilia Wolfenberger, 12, a Gold Key was a spur-of-the-moment shot. The photo depicts Wolfenberger’s sister “deep in thought” when they visited a Tuscany castle. “I saw the reflection of her face in the window and I thought it was an interesting composition,” said Wolfenberger.

Wolfenberger took the time to edit her photo with Photoshop, adding stylistic touches to the photo. “I chose [to make it] black and white,” she said, “because I didn’t want the color to take away from the main focus on the image. It makes it simpler.”

(Cecilia Wolfenberger)

(Lisa Kai)

Lisa Kai, 11, won a total of three Gold Keys for her paintings modeled after her baby pictures. She felt compelled to re-create these photos, calling them “very paintable.”

Each painting was different. The first two were painted with acrylic and the third with oil paint. “It was my first time finishing a painting using oil paint,” Kai said.

Additionally, she focused on making the toddler table painting brighter with “abstract colors and brush strokes.”

The dress that won Sophia Daly, 12, a Gold Key, titled “Deep Ocean,” aims to capture the “beauty of nature and the connection of nature and femininity.” Daly draws inspiration for her dresses from nature.

The process to create the dress was long and tedious, taking Daly nearly six months to complete. Daly had to source the fabric—with a lot of it coming from New York— and then make trial dresses as well as perform alterations before tracing the final patterns onto paper. When describing her sewing process, Daly noted that she did “the bulk of my assembly by machine and the finishing work by hand.”

(Sophia Daly)

Adeline Murphy, 11, won a Gold Key for the digital art she created in her Graphic Design class. She drew inspiration from National Park postcard designs.

She started with an old photo of the Rocky Mountains before adding in deer, the sun, birds, and trees to “give the piece even more of a wilderness feel.”

(Adeline Murphy)