Cassidy Skinner’s entry for the Indiana Electric Cooperative 2025 Calendar of Student Art Contest, ‘Flower Girl”, impressed the judges with the detailing and lifelike quality of the scratchboard picture of her Great Dane, Dottie. 

Skinner is an 18-year-old senior at Whitko High School in South Whitley, Indiana. Along with winning Best of Show and first place in the 11th-grade category, she also won the 11th-grade honorable mention for her picture of an owl perched on a branch.

Skinner has had many interests over the years, such as softball and archery, but art has been a constant. “Art is something I have been passionate about for a long time,” she said. “I started as a kid, as many artists do. I enjoy it.”

She started out drawing a lot of anime (a style of Japanese film and television characters), “I have about 100 very bad sketchbooks of little kiddie drawings,” she said. She still enjoys drawing anime and is working on a comic in her free time, “I have a few chapters done. It’s fun to work on my anime digitally.”

Her Best of Show-winning art started as a class assignment in Daniel Malicki’s art class. “That wasn’t the intended drawing for the contest. My owl was supposed to be my main submission. But I thought, ‘Why not turn them both in?’”

 “The inspiration is a photo of Dottie when she was 6 or 7 months old. The flowers around her neck are flowers that would bloom in November. I really liked doing scratchboard. I thought I wouldn’t enjoy it because, to be honest, it’s a lot of work. Creating the scratchboard took significantly longer than anything else I made, even the owl. I had to take it home every night, but I thought it turned out well.”

Malicki encouraged her to submit it along with her owl piece, which won honorable mention for her grade.

“For the owl piece, before working on the contest submission, I had been working on Christmas presents involving birds for my grandparents and the rest of my family. I had been painting them very colorfully in gouache, which is my favorite medium. I thought, ‘Well, I’m already painting an owl. I should try my hand at drawing one.’ I had a previous assignment with a moth, so I kind of merged the ideas. I also tied in November items like snow and falling leaves.”

The contest judges were so impressed with both of Skinner’s pieces that it was hard to decide which would be the overall winner.

After high school, Skinner plans to attend college and get an art education degree. She is considering Manchester University in Indiana or Siena Heights University in Michigan.

The 2025 Cooperative Calendar of Student Art is available at participating electric cooperatives around Indiana and by mail through Indiana Connection. The contest to illustrate the 2026 calendar has begun. Entries are due Feb. 28. For details on how to order a calendar and the 2026 contest, please visit IndianaConnection.org.