Paxton’s mural dream becomes a reality

by Sydney Shain

Seniors Julia McQueen, Olivia Lehmann, Aaron Foster, and Morgan Reed successfully finished their first project as Art IV students. The new mural near the Auto Collision classroom depicts a caricature-like Cardinal in an old blue car, with the school district and Auto Collision class name displayed across its tires.

“It’s a pretty basic project,” McQueen explains. “It’s good to start off the year with something easy like that.” She admits the height of the wall they were working on made the work rather difficult, but in her opinion, the design itself was not particularly complex.

Olivia Lehmann, however, had her own issue with the project.

“I couldn’t make a straight line to save my life,” Lehmann said. Other than that, it seems like the project itself was fairly simple to execute.

“This is something Mr. Paxton has been wanting for a year, so it was good to get started.” Austin Lauxman said, “We took a logo that he already had, then traced and painted it. My first year we did something similar…my very first Art Four class finished the mural above the Cardinal’s Nest. It’s not nearly as sharp as this.”

Looking ahead in the year, the Art Four students plan to work on individual projects with the suggestions and assistance of Mr. Lauxman, in multiple different mediums. Lauxman doesn’t predict any future mural projects for this group, but the art class will be putting out other new materials regularly throughout the year.