2 Lincoln-Way West students create realistic pencil drawings

In a strange way, procrastination was key for sophomore Caeley Doran, a Lincoln-Way West student. During remote learning, she and her classmates in the advanced drawing and painting class had to do a colored pencil project.

“It was like 1 a.m. and I had wrapping paper and bows on the floor of my room and I needed to choose a topic for the next day in class,” Doran said. “I grabbed bows, laid them out on the counter and took a picture.”

Doran had her project idea.

Doran and sophomore Sarah Fuchsgruber had their artwork highlighted by the district on social media. The students were given some freedom to pick their topic and were not given exact direction.

Doran said she spent about 12 to 15 hours on the project as each bow took her roughly two hours.

“I just tried to make sure that all my blending was smooth and not streaky,” she said.

In class, it is common to be assigned a specific topic, but Doran said the freedom on this one helped her create something she is even more proud of.

“If I had a topic, I think I still could have done a good job, but picking the random object spiked my interest.”

For Fuchsgruber, she was not sure exactly where the inspiration to draw pancakes came from.

“Maybe I had an appetite,” she said. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t so easy. I was thinking about doing a shoe, but I wanted to do something that was more challenging.”

From there, she just googled pictures of pancakes and finally landed on one for reference that was zoomed in and showed lots of detail, which is exactly what she wanted.

Fuchsgruber has done colored pencil drawings before and regularly finds herself just sketching in her book.

The whole piece took her about 15 to 20 hours. She spent the most time and effort on the top pancake as that one had burn marks.

She said she was working on it in the other room while watching a show and as some frustration came out, her dad would check on her and ask, “Are you good?”

“I was just trying to get it to be exact,” she said. “The syrup was a challenge for me. It was the most fun, too.”