Junior, Ella Woody sits in her kitchen asking her father to “look like you’ve just experienced the worst pain to man, the worst in your life,”. She then proceeds to take tons of photos of him smiling and laughing. She spent a month staring at these photos. Woody joined an art UIL competition and ended up making the state competition, And ended up getting her art displayed at a viewing. She used her father as a reference model, for a realism drawing. Except unexpectedly she put a twist on it and made it a double perspective photo where her father was smiling on one side of his face and frowning on the other. Thankfully he didn’t have to sit there for hours because she just made him laugh “That part was easy but then I had to set the scene for him and ask him to act like he was in the most pain he’s ever been in his life, act like you’re in despair, put a hand on your head, act like you’re screaming crying on the inside. I got lots of pictures of him doing that but I ended up picking a few.” Woody said.

Woody always knew she was cut out for art, after all, she had been drawing since she learned how to pick up a pencil. But this year was different than the last, although last year she tried and didn’t make state she knew this year had to be different when she learned something about herself. “I realized I liked drawing people because I like seeing them come to life on paper, So I was like I should probably enter this competition because  I’m good at art and maybe I could actually win and my teacher also pushed me to do it again because I did it last year and didn’t get anywhere so this year I wanted to get farther and make state,” Woody said.

So she took the things she was good at, shading and realism, and put her double perspective idea to work. But this time she wanted to get a moral across because she wanted to portray the inside struggles people deal with, including her own. “Recently I’ve been trying to express more messages through my art because when one sees an image it typically manipulates how a person thinks or sees it,” Woody said. “So I wanted to show people how someone can look okay on the outside and portray themselves as put together but that doesn’t show what’s going on in their actual life like they’re actually not okay. I feel like as a whole we all have issues that no one knows about and there’s no way of knowing what’s actually going on inside or in their personal lives and I feel like just with my own experience with my own family we’re really hidden. Just like us sitting here right now we’re both wearing makeup similarly we’re both wearing other layers. Even if we sat down like this every day there’s not a definite way of knowing what’s going on beneath those layers.” Woody said.

She put so much work into this drawing and barely made the deadline. “Time was the biggest challenge, it took me a month and a half to do it and the only reason I was able to finish it in time was because of the huge ice storm that gave me some extra time. I was running a little short on time,” Woody said.

After the ice storm, late nights in her kitchen drawing, and constant scrolling through reference photos finally came the day of the results and she made it. While waiting for results Woody had a quiet moment with her art. “I expected to make state because I worked really hard on it and this is like one of the best drawings I’ve ever done, and I thought I definitely topped what I did last year. So when at the competition after everyone got interviewed and all the artwork was looked at they made a huge gallery of all the people who got a high score and that’s how you know which ones are going to be considered for the state. And I was just looking at all of them, all the other photos in the gallery, and I thought mine stood out and looked like I could call it pretty good.” Woody said.