Two of Padua Academy’s seniors, Grace Hunsinger and Deanna Wingel, recently participated in the Plein Art Competition. A Plein Art Competition is an art competition in which you are outdoors and painting. Each year, two seniors are nominated to go and Mrs.Vitollo, Padua’s Art Teacher, nominated Grace and Deanna for the 2013 school year.

Each year there are three winners and both Padua students won:  Deanna earned first place and Grace earned third. Each girl received a $1,000 scholarship to the college of her choice. As soon as Deanna found out that she was nominated,  she received golden advice, which was to dress in heavy layers. Deanna said, “By the time I was done it was hard for me to pick up my pastels, because my hands were so stiff and frozen. We weren’t allowed to wear gloves because we were painting.”

According to Deanna, the day went like this:  “half an hour before the competition started, we found out the location that we had to draw. Each contestant had to draw the landscape around the Winterthur’s Visitor’s center. Each contestant had to choose a spot.” Deanna said,  “This was extremely difficult because we all had to stay out of each others’ way.” Deanna drew the bridge and had four and a half hours to complete it. After the four and a half hours, they returned to the visitor’s center and the artwork was judged. At first Deanna was not even sure she wanted to do this, but is glad Mrs. Vitollo gave her the inspiration to do so. She enjoyed it so much that she hopes she gets the chance to be involved with the Plein Art events for adults soon!  Deanna also said,  “After the initial stress of being scared to stay within the given time range the competition was really relaxing and was nice to be able to sit and draw in nature.”

            The purpose of the competition is to bring a lot of different artists and the future artists together as one community. They get to know each other and even become friends. Deanna said “that an art community is formed, which is really nice! It is really nice to be able to see what everybody else created”. Deanna also added that even though everybody was drawing the same landscape, everything was different. They all agree on one main thing and that was, it was really nice to be surrounded by other artists. They were each others biggest supporters.