[wzslider autoplay=”true” info=”true” lightbox=”true”]UNF art students pulled together to put on a student-organized art festival March 6 at the fine arts center courtyard.

Georgia Ward-Collings, fine arts senior and president of the UNF Print Guild, said it was her idea to bring back Art Fest, last held in 2012.

Ward-Collings said all the guild presidents from different art departments met once a week for the entire school year to plan the festival.

She said this year’s festival was completely student-run and professors didn’t even know about it until a couple of months ago.

She said this year they decided to make the festival bigger than before. Art Fest is usually just an afternoon, but this year’s festival was all day, she said. The event was planned to run from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m.

Page Valtinson, fine arts senior, said Art Fest provides an opportunity for those who aren’t involved in the art department to come through and see all of the different things that happen here.

Valtinson said, “Art students get so involved in their own departments that we forget that other people don’t necessarily know or understand what we do back here.”

Ward-Collings said, “It’s a chance to show off what our department can do.”

She said each department has a different event for the festival.

She said sculpture’s iron pour was the big event for the day. A few dozen students geared up and partook in the pour.

Erica Mendoza, fine arts senior, explained the process. She said first you have to put iron and charcoal fuel in the furnace and wait ’till it gets hot and eventually melts. Then it comes out through the little spout and two people catch it with a big ladle and pour it into a mold.

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“There’s this common misconception that what we do is easy,” Mendoza said. “We all just lifted like a hundred or so pounds, and [the iron is] really, really hot, like 3000 degrees hot.”

Ward-Collings said they had scratch molds available for people who wanted to make their own design and pay $15 to get it poured.

She said printmaking was doing live t-shirt printing and a bunch of the printmaking guild members got one-foot square blocks and carved designs into them.

The theme for the designs was ‘we need a ray gun’, so everyone took that theme and went wherever they wanted with it, she said.

She said they’re using those blocks for live printing on the t-shirts today and printmaking also did a couple of demonstrations about the process of intaglio.

Valtinson taught the intaglio demonstration. She said, “[intaglio is] where you etch [a design] into a zinc plate with nitric acid to create an image.”

Ward-Collings said the painting department is doing live paintings all day and an interactive project where attendees can paint portraits on canvas cards.

She said ceramics is doing a couple of firings with their raku kiln, photography is going to have a photobooth, and graphic design is doing a design off.

Aaron Anderson, English senior, said the iron pour was awesome and had a great turnout.

Email Blake Middleton at reporter32@unfspinnaker.com