My Proudest Achievement by Eli

My Proudest Achievement by Eli - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

My proudest achievement of recent time has been being able to design and paint the backgrounds for a school play. I've decided ever since my Sophomore year of high school, that I will pursue my dream of becoming an animator! So since then, I've been endlessly drawing and creating, doing everything in my power to become a better artist. I'm not the best, not by a long shot, but I try and sometimes I'm pretty proud of what I come up with. This is one of those times.
While I don't hide my passion for art, I'm not very out in the open about it either. So it's always pretty flattering just for people to mention that I'm an artist. I'm a member of my school's drama club, I have been since my Sophomore year. Our drama teacher is a retired volunteer who also owns a local non-profit theater in the adjacent town. For the first play we're doing this year, she got new stage flats, a large piece of vertical wood that's painted for scenery in our plays. She immediately came to me and asked if I could design some backgrounds for the play. As expected, I was flattered, she knew about my passion for art, and thought I'd be good enough to paint for one of her plays. Stage flats can be very expensive, so she's taking a big risk asking a student to paint these brand new stage setting pieces. I didn't want to let her down, so I got to work.
I was designing two different scenes for our medieval themed play, one throne room, and one forest set. I spent hours drawing, re-drawing, retracing, retracting. Heck, I went through almost an entire sketchbook on just these two pictures. I wanted them to fit the play, it was medieval, had several song cues, and generally very kid-like. So I wanted to portray that in the backgrounds. I studied several different cartoons and films with medieval settings in preparation for my piece. I also had to take into consideration the limited resources we had. While it is a school activity, none of us, not even our drama teacher get paid to do this. We only had about fifteen different cans of paint. We could mix to create more of a variety, but this was house paint, not acrylic like I'm used to, it will not mix easily. So after two weeks of slaving over making the best setting with what we had, I had finished.
I ended up deciding with a very simple design. Taking note from cartoon backgrounds of simplicity, while also making it visually pleasing. We spent two days with a team of six, including myself, twelve hours total, we finally finished. Thirteen flats painted, and zero disappointment. They came out honestly WAY BETTER than I ever thought it would! I was also memorizing my lines as a lead role in conjunction with designing and painting the sets. These were going to be used for seven shows. Two elementary performances, two high school performances, and three local theater performances. I received many compliments from my fellow actors and random strangers who watched the show. It really boosted my self-confidence as an artist. While getting my portfolio reviewed for art school, the judge commented on the sets, saying they were well done. While other students had incredible art, it made me realize that in the perspective of them, I have amazing art too. This was an incredibly invaluable experience for me as an artist, making me see my potential, and that's why it's my proudest achievement.