Student art on display

FD school board purchases 3 students’ artwork

Art created by three Fort Dodge Community Schools students will adorn the walls of the School Board's meeting room for the next year.

Each year, the School Board purchases three pieces of art from students -- one in elementary, one in middle school and one in high school. The art pieces will be displayed in the meeting room for the next year, and then later moved to the hallways in the central office to be part of the district's permanent collection.

This year's art pieces include:

• "African Safari" by Harmoni Owens, Cooper fourth-grader.

• "Dragon eye" by Jillian Cook, Fort Dodge Middle School eighth-grader.

• "Rustic Kitchen" by Grace Tolliver, Fort Dodge Senior High senior.

Owens' piece was a cardboard project nominated by art teacher Janell Butler.

"Students got to choose their animal and then build the animal up using cardboard and then we use multimedia paint markers and Sharpies to create the detail," Butler said.

Cook's pastel dragon eye was nominated by art teacher Wendy Daniel-Wiseman.

"I had my students make dragon eyes out of oil pastels," Daniel-Wiseman said. "They looked at lizard eyes and all the different types of contrasting they have with the colors and things like that. Hers was by far the most brilliant out of all my students."

Tolliver's artwork was nominated by art teacher Deidra Miller. Tolliver is in Miller's Painting II class at FDSH.

"This is an oil painting that she did," Miller said. "It was her first-ever oil painting. She's a wonderful painter, a beautiful artist inside and out and is planning on going into art."