Congressional Art Competition

Ever since I could remember, I loved arts and crafts. My favorite toys were pens, pencils, crayons, drawing and construction paper, coloring books, scissors and glue. I'd spend hours drawing, coloring, cutting, and/or pasting. It was a hobby of mine that I truly enjoyed. My mom would buy me coloring books and I used to love to color in them. I wasn't much for abstract, so naturally, I'd color the sky blue, grass green, sun yellow, and so on. And I always tried my hardest on coloring in the line. After a while, coloring books weren't for me to color in, but for me to copy the image by drawing them freehand. And I loved Disney's animated movies so I had The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Bambi, The Lion King, Aladdin, etc.

At King Intermediate School, I was in the then called "G/T - Gifted and Talented" art class. From my view, my classmates were far better than me.

During high school, I took a mechanical drawing class my freshman year. As a sophomore, I took basic art. The following year, I had yearbook. And my senior year, I enrolled in architectural drafting, yearbook and because my teacher, Ms. Harrington, thought I did well in her basic art class, she got me in the advanced drawing and painting class.

In Ms. Harrington's art class, we did a pointillism painting using a picture clipping from a magazine or catalog. I love horses, so I had a photo of a horse derby. For my first try at pointillism, it came out okay. During my senior year on my winter break, I had time so I tried pointillism again. This time, it was of a horse, mainly the head and front legs, jumping over a hurdle in an equestrian event.

Each year, congress holds a national art competition. In Hawaii, each island pics about 5 finalists to compete for the state finalist. My horse painting from my basic art class was submitted for the competition. It won the Council Award and became an Oahu Finalist along with 3 of my classmates from Castle High School and a student from Nanakuli High School.

The state finalist would be chosen at an award ceremony held at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center in Kahului, Maui. For that, we received a free roundtrip flight to attend the award ceremony on Maui. Unfortunately we didn't win and get to go on to compete for the national award in Washington D.C., but a student from the Big Island did. That was fine with me, afterall, we did make it up to the summit of Haleakala and got a group shot.