Samara is a high school student from Indiana. She enjoys spending her time outside and is fond of taking pictures of things around her. Over COVID-19 she used these pictures as motivation and as a moment of joy to remember that there are bigger things to be thankful for in life.

Hi, my name is Erin. I am a high school student from Indiana. Ever since my young age I have been interested in making art. I remember I always loved coloring. As I entered high school, I joined my school’s 3D Art program and started making pottery pieces and fell in love with them. Here are a few of my favorites.

My name is Emma Nolting and I am a Senior in high school. I enjoy creating tribal 3D Art. Here is my favorite creation.

My name is Dani, I am a 24 year old visual artist from Tacoma, Washington.

At the start of the pandemic I was living in Chile: teaching English, speaking Spanish, learning how to tattoo, and falling in love. My goal was to make myself a permanent resident and work in the field of international education & meaningful travel.

Unfortunately I felt forced to come home due to the uncertainty of it all: at the time, I didn't know how bad the virus would be and I was afraid to be away from my family.

Fast forward to living at home for the last 6 months. My career in international education has become more exceedingly difficult to enter and I might have to accept a temporary hold on this dream. It is a hard pill to swallow given that I was just getting started in the right direction. However, it is not without its silver linings.

Since lockdown, a new sense of creativity has been flowing out of me and it hasn't slowed down. I faced my hesitation of trying digital art and ended up really enjoying it! Now, I have been expressing myself with mixed media and simple animation. I love combining paintings and photographs with digital interventions in order to bring them to life.

In my household I live among 2 family members with severe anxiety and depression as well as OCD, such mental health challenges that have deepened during the pandemic. This said, I try to protect my mental health at all costs in order to be a stable figure for my Dad and my brother. Making art is key in this effort because it takes me to a space of whimsy and serenity when I need to escape. I hope that my work can give others the same reprise.

The pandemic has affected my family and my routines in many ways. Some are good, like how we have been able to have many more family meals because we are all home more often. But, others are not as beneficial, like how much less motivated I’ve been to complete simple tasks. I’ve definitely experienced negative emotions during lockdown, mostly due to missing my friends, family, and essentially how life was before. Art helps to combat these feelings by taking my mind off of the situation and focusing on something that I find more fun. Art is definitely a way I’ve coped with the lockdown, especially in the form of music. Listening to music, writing music, dancing to music, it just helps to calm me down and make me happier. Painting is another form of art that has helped me. I’ve painted shoes and water bottles for other people, and creating things that help bring happiness to others also brings happiness to me. Seeing someone else smile because of my art helps me to stop focusing as much on all of these scary world events.

Graduating college during a pandemic has been nothing short of tumultuous. I’m lucky to have a family home to return to while I navigate my short- and long-term future.

I’ve had my fair share of unmotivated, miserable quarantine days. My natural extroverted nature caused me to feel loneliness like never before. I was sucked into a hole of Twitter doomscrolling, hours of terrifying news reports, and the constant internal pressure of hunting for job openings that simply were not there. My hopes of working as a video editor grew slim as productions postponed for the year and creative friends flew to further corners of the world.

Slowly, I adapted. I started by crafting small projects all alone: my first animation, art collaging in a notebook, product photography for my Depop shop. Then I reached out to my community: my dad needed an introductory video for his new job, the bakery I work at asked for social media content, a digital Gen-Z magazine called Haloscope accepted me as a film writer. By first focusing on personal expansion, I was able to take back creative control and overcome pandemic isolation.

Being in lockdown has been taxing. I already suffer from anxiety and germaphobia, so this pandemic was bad news from the start. But what I’ve learned this year and will continue to practice is the value of social outreach. From gathering support from old classmates for the renaming of my high school in honor of our late first Black principal Dr. Derrick Nelson to promoting local BLM resources and small business efforts, I have utilized my social media platforms like never before.

Makeup is my creative outlet. It's a way to show the world who you are and what you’re feeling without saying a single word. I have been doing makeup for a little less than three years and still love the feeling I get when I do it. I was inspired by many drag queens to do makeup because they showed everyone their own sense of style, past, and future goals all through their makeup and fashion.Transitioning to a life with a pandemic was a very difficult experience for me. I suffer from both depression and anxiety so it was very difficult to endure a lot of change at once and not be able to see my friends and family. Doing makeup was able to keep me calm and give me peace when things got harder and being quarantined gave me more time to do my art. I did my makeup every other day at least because it was my calm in the storm that is corona. Having time to myself in quarantine also grew my confidence in my artistry and taught me that I should be proud of my work.