Meadow Ridge Student Wins Illinois Art Show

Orland Park, Last year, one of the final art projects of Ms. Blaser’s fifth grade art class was designing a mandala. The artwork of one of those students is now part of a display traveling throughout the state of Illinois to various schools and libraries.

The Meadow Ridge art teacher gave the assignment to her students to learn how to create a symmetrical layout using compasses to design their own pattern to be flipped and rotated around a cork circle.

Cameron Woolery, a former Meadow Ridge 5th grade art student who now attends Century Jr. High, created an oil pastel mandala but he was not satisfied with his final design. Cameron wanted to recreate his Mandala design using different materials and subject matter. With the aid of Ms. Blaser, he used books, magazines, and images for inspiration and spent many hours at school and home working to create a new circular design incorporating different animals. The animals were extremely detailed and shaded carefully with pencil. Cameron stated, “I am so proud of my work. It was challenging drawing and shading with pencil being left-handed.” 

Ms. Blaser submitted Cameron’s art piece as well as nineteen other student art pieces that were judged in the Annual IAEA (Illinois Are Educators Association) Student Art Show. Cameron’s artwork was one of the four, fifth grade artworks to be selected to be in the Student Art Show.  This year over 640 entries from grades K-12 were submitted from IAEA members. Students and their families were invited to attend the awards ceremony to acknowledge and honor the winners at the IAEA Student Show Reception and ceremony on October 26th.

The Art Show will be traveling throughout Illinois beginning in November 2013 through the end of August 2014. More information on IAEA’s  Traveling art Show can be found at: http://ilaea.org/student-show/.