How do you spend your free time? Whether it’s binge-watching a popular new show or reading a couple of chapters of your new favorite book, everyone has one thing that brings them joy like nothing else. After a tremendously long day filled with school, exhausting games and practices, and challenging homework, what do you do to reset and recharge your brain? For junior Liliana Brachle, that is drawing, which has now become a huge part of her life over the years.
Liliana first discovered her passion for art during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was in fourth grade. Although the lockdown was a hard time for the majority of people, it allowed people to look internally and figure out what truly made them happy when you couldn’t just go hang out with friends you usually saw every single day. For Liliana, she used “doodling” to entertain herself throughout the day whenever she was bored, creating small illustrations out of scraps of paper lying around her house. “I just loved how it allowed me to be creative at any time and helped me relax,” she said.
Liliana was new to Kingswood Oxford’s visual arts program last year. Through taking the Foundations in Arts course, she learned multiple forms of artistic expression, including realism, painting, and drawing, whilst also enhancing her artistic abilities by learning things such as color theory, shading styles, and how light reflects off objects throughout the course.
She also took a drawing class, where she developed her ability to create more realistic pieces, reference real people, places, or things, and add dimension to her art without it looking splotchy or messy. In addition to drawing, Lilliana took ceramics, where she used the wheel to create pieces of art that she could actually use in her everyday life. “I love throwing on the wheel,” she said, “ I really enjoyed making projects in that class.”
This year, Liliana is in Portfolio Prep. In this course, Liliana will spend two semesters creating a stronger, more cohesive portfolio of art she could use for college applications. Although Liliana never explicitly stated whether she will continue her art studies after graduating from KO, it’s obvious that she is determined to improve her portfolio through this class while also keeping her work true to herself as well as her views on how art should be created.
Lilliana’s story proves that art has had a significant role in her life and will continue to be for years to come.
