When Anniston Monsour was younger, a friend celebrating a birthday asked her and another girl to tag along on a hot air balloon ride.
“It was so much fun up there. I liked it a lot,” said the Lamar School senior who never dreamed that one day her artwork would be chosen to grace the new balloon of a Meridian balloonist.
“I think it is going to be pretty cool one day if I see it flying over my house,” she said.
Last fall, the Art II students at Lamar School took on the challenging art of hot air balloon design as part of a class art contest. The graded assignment came about after balloonist Fred Poole, whose son Devon is a student at Lamar, couldn’t come up with a design for his new Kubicek 130 hot air balloon.
So, Poole turned to a friend, Lamar art teacher Leslie Carruth, who decided to hold a contest among her Art II students to see if one of them could come up with a winner.
“I have known Fred for years and have taught his son in elementary school and had the privilege of teaching him last year,” Carruth said. “Fred was like, ‘Hey, I need a new balloon, and I thought it would be kind of cool to do a contest with your students.’”
Carruth, who introduces her students to a wide range of artistic mediums, thought it would be a departure for her students, giving them a fun assignment that would allow them to be creative and think outside the box.
“When they come to Art II, I push them harder and expect more,” she said. “We go from drawing to painting to ceramics to photography to three-dimensional art. This week we are doing graphic design and digital art. We try to cover everything so they can experience something of everything.”
The journey the Lamar art students went through in completing the art project is featured in the January/February edition of the national magazine, Ballooning: Journal of the Balloon Federation of America. The four-page spread explains how the students helped Poole come up with a colorful design for his new hot air balloon.
Poole provided Carruth with a Kubicek template detailing the process of creating a design for the envelope, which is the part of the aircraft that looks like a balloon. The envelope is made up of 24 gores that expand at the top and taper at the bottom toward the skirt.
Carruth had the students watch footage of hot air balloons at festivals and in flight to familiarize themselves with the parts of a balloon, its shape, and potential constraints of their desired color palettes. They visited the Kubicek website to get information about the construction of their envelopes, design options and specifications.
She told the students, “You have to understand that it’s not a flat surface, that this actually wraps around and forms a balloon, so whatever you do, the pattern has to continue and you have to have something that ties in to the top and the skirt at the bottom.”
The students were given a paper template to create their design using colored pencils.
“I told the kids if you are going to design something like this, don’t just throw something together. Have something meaningful. So think of something that represents you or something that represents, colorwise, something that you’re passionate about.”
Many of the students took her advice.
Her son, senior William Carruth, created his design in the colors of white, blue and green diagonal stripes in a nod to the Mississippi Organ Recovery Agency.
“My sister passed away in 2017, and we donated her organs,” William said, so he wanted to show his support for MORA and organ donation through his design.
Senior Mallory Smith drew inspiration from the state’s flag.
“For my design, I did red, a darker blue and gold for the Mississippi flag,” she said. “I tried to get ideas for inspiration, and when I saw the flag I said, ‘You know what, that would be a very good idea.’”
In paying tribute to Mississippi, she said she could envision the hot air balloon drifting through the overhead sky.
Smith said the assignment was more challenging than she originally thought.
“It was kind of difficult,” she said. “It was confusing on how to put things in certain places to where it would wrap around right and line up together where you wanted it to. Ms. Carruth helped a lot and made sure we were doing it correctly.”
But, she said, “It was fun to do, and it was a break from the heavy projects of, like, whole canvases and it was really interesting.”
In making her diagonal, striped panel design, Monsour said she based it on her favorite color blue and her other go-to colors of green, yellow and red.
“I just wanted it to be colorful,” she said of the design. “I didn’t want it to be dull.”
Then, she opted to do alternating dark and light colors down the diagonal stripe.
“It went dark blue, light blue all of the way down. Dark yellow, light yellow all of the way down. I didn’t do pink, but I did red and orange together, alternating all of the way down. Then, I did dark green, light green all of the way down.”
The brightly colored end result was enough to be selected the winner.
Poole’s balloon is still being constructed, but Monsour said she hopes to see it flying over her house one day.
“I will be very excited to see it finished,” she said.
And, Monsour said, she is looking forward to her balloon ride for creating the winning design.