“I started creating art, the second that I could first pick up a pencil,” junior Isabel Park said.

Park has been making art since she was two years old. She first started dedicating time to painting in the seventh grade and it quickly became her passion. Now in highschool she competes in the Visual Arts Scholastic Event or (VASE)  creating portraits and paintings in state wide competitions.

2024s annual VASE competition featured 30 out of 139 participants from Round Rock isd high schools advancing to win the state level. While the process for VASE is not complicated students still have to meet expectations for the contest.  

“At first it’s pretty simple, you have to have an artwork ready by a deadline and write about it, some things like how you made it,” art teacher Nathan Dinh said. “Then at the event, you show it to a juror and you explain the things you wrote about and they give you a score for it”

As students advance throughout the competition the work and standards grow increasingly harder.

“For state it’s pretty tricky, what happens is all the highest scored art work that are received, pulled together and then, they’re compared to each other,” Dinh said.  “Then all the jurors vote on which ones go up to state and which ones don’t, so its more subjective after the scoring part.”

Out of the 30 students from Round Rock ISD only three were from McNeil. One of the state winners from McNeil was junior Isabel Park.

“Pretty much anybody can do the normal VASE, you go to your interview, there’ll be a whole process where they’re judging you and then they’ll announce what your score was,” Park said. “It’s one through four, four being the highest, all the pieces that have a four go to area where all the fours get a chance of making state. That one, they judge it more based on how it looks and less of the meaning.”

Park plans to keep competing in VASE competitions in high school, and continue to focus on portraits and hyper realism.

“I feel like the face captures a lot of emotions in people and shows how people are,” Park said. “It’s the most expressive part of a human, a face is so expressible.”

Park strives to be the best artist she can be, focusing on things like attention to detail and hyperrealism to indicate that.

“She likes to paint with a lot of rich color” Dinh said. “she is very detail oriented and hard working.”

Although Park focuses primarily on painting portraits, she also explores other mediums of art like sculpting and drawing.

“I feel like I have more freedom with sculpting, because I’m not putting as much pressure on myself with it,” Park said. “I’ve done some abstract pieces with sculpture, but I also do some portraits. I’m working on a portrait right now in my class and I’ve made them before.”

Park’s creativity follows her outside of school, as she occasionally creates art work in exchange for paid commissions. 

“A lot of times people will pay me, the commissions are usually really huge, like 50×20,” Park said “I had one that was a face of some girl with a butterfly and some people have asked [me] to paint them and a friend or something. I even had one where it was an interpretation of a poem.”

Park not only interprets poems for her art, but also writes them in her spare time. She also has aspirations to go further with her writing. 

“I want to perform it and I have a lot of poetry that I write but it’s mainly just writing for now,” Park said.  “I’m writing a book right now actually, it’s poetry about two best friends.” 

Park sometimes gets overwhelmed by her art, to help clear her mind and help with her creative process she likes to go running.

“Honestly painting will stress me out sometimes, it shouldn’t but it does.”  Park said. “It helps me get more inspiration being outside and running helps me clear my thoughts.”

While painting can have its stressful moments it also has just as many calming moments.

“Sometimes I get really frustrated because I stress myself out with it and I’m like what am I doing?” Park said “Or I’m painting until it looks fine then I really enjoy it when it’s going in a good direction.”

Having routines and processes helps Park eliminate stress while painting. Her process includes underpainting and mapping out colors.

“Usually what I’ll do is I’ll start off with a sketch of what I’m gonna do and basically map it all out where I’m gonna put things, then I’ll do an underpainting,” Park said. “With commissions it’s even more focused. Because I’m not doing it for myself, I have to be very extra detailed with it and make sure everything’s right.”

Parks planning for paintings can start way before the actual painting with finding reference photos and ideas.

“Finding people to paint is my biggest struggle, because I try to get my own references,” Park said. “Most of the time it just turns out to be my sister, because I can’t find anybody, but I’ve done friends before.”

Parks family and friends are a big part of the inspiration for her art, they also largely support and encouragement her.

“All my friends are very supportive, my grandparents as well but my dad is my biggest motivator with art, he’s pushed me most of my life,” Park said. “He’s an artist too, so he likes the fact that I like art. So he’s been helping me since I was a kid, developing my art skills to where [they are] now.”

A future goal for Parks art career is to have her own art gallery.

“I want to have a gallery at some point so I’m trying to get enough works for that,” Park said. “I mean, I want to sell more of my art.” 

After highschool, Park is stuck between wanting to continue to create art and wanting to make money for her future career.

“Artists don’t really make that much money,” Park said. “I would want to be a tattoo artist, but that would probably be a lot, I want to go into the medical field because it makes money.”

However if art as a career made more money it would be Parks dream job.

If it made more money I would for sure, go into it” Park said. “It’d be fun, my dream job would be to be a traveling artist, go around the world, travel and paint it.”

As park focuses her art efforts into highschool she sets goals to better her skills overall.

“My main aspiration is to be good at hyperrealism,” Park said.  “I feel like I’ve always just been trying to work towards that, with paintings. I feel like an internal goal for myself is to try to be the best version of what I can be.“