Alexander Junior High School provided students with the opportunity to develop real-world skills by allowing them to cultivate their love of art.

The school hosted its Quest Art Show on Tuesday, featuring the school’s seventh- and eighth-grade gifted and talented students.

Quest teacher Vickie Driskell said the students spent about nine weeks creating their art projects.

“The eighth graders did the mosaic portraits out of torn magazines and the tooth-pick bridges,” Driskell said. “The seventh graders did the masterpiece reproductions.”

Seventh-grade student Sam Allen explained the process the students were required to complete for the masterpieces reproduction project.

“We were given a stack of books and you had to choose five artists from them, then out of those five, you had to select one that you really liked,” Allen said. “Then we had to select one of their masterpieces, put it on to a small sheet of paper, then we had to sketch it out on a bigger piece of paper and paint the final project.”

Allen reproduced Edward Hopper’s 1930 painting, “Early Sunday Morning.”

“I really liked it because it’s very colorful for such a downtown scheme, and I liked how much was in it,” Allen said. “I liked art before this project, but I started to like it more with this project.”

Eighth-grade student Carley Craig said she enjoyed the project because she got to be creative with it.

“These are our mosaic portraits,” Craig said. “We got a ton of magazines, and we ripped up the pieces of the colors that we wanted and we put them all together. We had to draw it first so you drew the shape and filled it in however you wanted to. It took us a little while because it was hard to find all the flesh (color) because everybody needed it. I liked the project because I’ve done something like it before, and I liked pulling the pieces out and putting it together to make a picture.”

Driskell said it is important to expose children to art this young because it develops their critical thinking processes.

“These projects encompass a lot of different skills that we teach,” Driskell said. “They have to be able to work together as a group. There is math included; they have to be able to communicate. They have to be able to mix the colors. It covers a lot of skills that we cover in the classroom.

“At the beginning they didn’t think they could do it at all,” Driskell said. “When they saw some projects that had been done in the past, they didn’t think they could do it. When you show them what they’re going to do, they can’t believe it. After they go through the process, they just have so much more confidence in their abilities.”