Senior Evan Brummer has had quite a bit of time on his hands during quarantine. With such time and nowhere to go, Brummer decided that to occupy his time he would draw an illustration for the senior class. “I had practiced tracing and turning things into cartoons before on some of my own pictures and for last year’s prom card, and I just kind of decided I wanted to draw more people.” 

Thinking it was going to be a small project to pass time, he soon realized that it would be much more. “I did McKenzie Waters as a test and it turned out pretty good, so I turned it into a big project where I drew someone from each sport and made it into a poster.” 

The next step was creating the poster with help from friends. “I got a lot of feedback from Kylie Neal and Zach McKay during the process. They basically taught me how to show depth with the colors, and that was super helpful.” The website that he used was also helpful in the process. “I did almost everything with Paint.NET. I picked out some cool pictures, traced them, colored them in, used gradients for shading and lights.” Once Brummer had figured out how to create this piece, it was time to decide on the sports portrayed in the poster. Brummer already had an idea of what sports he wanted in the drawing, so he didn’t have a “specific process” to choosing the athletics.  

“I wanted to do every sport. Unfortunately, there weren’t going to be any seniors out for girls golf this year, so I didn’t have anyone for that. Also, when I was in my planning phase— making a list of the sports and deciding what senior I was going to draw from each sport— I was using the list of sports from the high school activities page on the school website. As it turns out, that page is a little outdated. Before somebody reminded me, I almost forgot about girls wrestling because it wasn’t in the list,” Brummer said. 

“Somebody also asked me about archery a few days ago, and until that point it hadn’t even crossed my mind. I do feel bad for missing archery, those would’ve been fun to draw.”

When explaining the process Brummer said, “The most complex ones were the tennis players, especially Nile Petersen’s. I used a grid brush for the strings on the rackets, and then duplicated the layer to give it the same black outline that everything else had. Nile’s was especially difficult because I still wanted his leg to be visible through the strings of his racket, so I had to do some extra layering to make that work.”

“Organizing everyone so that the poster looked good was also pretty time-consuming. It’s hard to fit that many people into one image,” Brummer said. Working on the project was time-consuming and demanding. With Brummer’s hard work and drive he was able to strive for completion. “I worked on it without breaks (except for sleeping) for three or four days straight. If I did this during the school year, it probably would’ve taken me several weeks to finish.” 

Brummer said he didn’t know how people would react to his work. “Obviously I hoped everyone would like it, but I’ll admit I was a little nervous that they wouldn’t turn out as good as I had hoped. I did have a lot of reassurance from the people that saw it while I was working on it.”  

Now Brummer, with the help of some friends, has completed the project with pride.  “Seeing how the finished product turned out, it’s really satisfying to be able to sit back and appreciate whatever you’ve made.”