No matter who
wins this year’s AJC Peachtree Road Race, the University of West Georgia will
have a presence in the race. The winner of the t-shirt design contest will be
announced July 4, the day of the race, and three of the school’s art students
are among the five finalists.
But designs by
two other UWG artists are already part of the Peachtree event. Race volunteers
will wear Holly Berndt’s peach-hued design. T-shirts bearing Kyler Hembree’s
road sign design will be on sale during the 2012 Peachtree Health and Fitness
Expo on July 1 and 2 at the Georgia World Congress
Center.
“I’m proud of
what the students have done,” said Clint Samples, associate professor of art,
who uses the contest as a teaching tool in his Digital Media for Artists class.
“This is a huge accomplishment. We are holding our own against professionals in
the Atlanta area.”
His students
have been contenders in the design contest for four consecutive years. Two, in
2011 and 2010, have won it. Last year, designs by two of Samples’ students were
also selected for other events related to the road race – the expo and the Atlanta
Track Club’s In-Training for Peachtree program. In 2009 a design submitted by Samples
was used for the expo t-shirt.
For this year’s
contest Berndt, 23, took Samples advice to paint first. She painted the peach
and the swoop of color below it by hand, scanning it into her computer later.
Berndt used Photoshop for the skyline and overlaid the letters with the colors
from her painting.
“I wasn’t
expecting to win anything,” said Berndt, an art education major who graduated
this spring. She will begin teaching at Staley Middle School in Sumter County
this fall.
“They want you
to be different and I tried to make mine different. I wanted it to be pretty –
something that someone would want to wear,” Berndt said.
Hembree created
her design when she took Sample’s class last year. The art education major, who
graduated in 2011, is teaching at South Paulding Middle School. She recently
opened Local Color, an art studio offering classes for children and adults, on
Main Street in Villa Rica.
The call from
the Atlanta Track Club “was totally out of the blue,” said Hembree, 28.
Hembree started
her design with a montage of road signs. “I wanted to do stuff that you would
see on the road.”
But she decided
the look was too cluttered and simplified the design, creating one red, white
and blue sign instead. She used a Sharpie marker to write “Peachtree” and added
a stem and leaf to the top of the sign. “To give it that Peachtree look,” she
said.
