A Torquay College student won the People’s Choice Award in the 2024 Surf Coast Shire Community Arts Calendar competition.
DeeDee’s mixed media piece, ‘Salty’, received attention and most of the votes from the Surf Coast community, leading to the nine-year-old being the competition’s thirteenth winner.
Salty will be featured on the cover of the 2024 Surf Coast Shire Community Arts Calendar alongside 12 earlier winners selected by a judging panel at the calendar’s exhibition launch on October 13.
DeeDee said she was “very surprised” to win the People’s Choice award and that her artwork was made with acrylic paint, food colouring and saltwater.
“I used food colouring to draw the waves in the back and then put salt over the top,” she said.
“I also used sponges to make the texture on the fish. We dipped half the sponge in white paint and half the sponge in another colour and then we printed the paper and cut the fish out of it.”
Surf Coast Shire councillor Gary Allen said DeeDee’s artwork, where she used sea salt and sponges to create texture, was a perfect choice for the 2024 calendar’s cover.
“The artwork is beautiful, and so colourful. For someone in grade three I have no doubt, there are many more artworks in DeeDee’s future,” he said.
“All of the pieces entered this year show the diversity found in the Surf Coast, and every year I love seeing how artists capture and express the theme.”
Fifty-five artists entered the calendar competition across Child, Youth, 2D and 3D categories. More information on the competition’s winners is available on the Surf Coast Shire’s website.
