One of the most popular shows at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts is the “Junior Art Exhibition,” featuring 400 art pieces by 200 Orange County students from kindergarten through grade 12. The show reveals the vast variety of artistic influences that students draw from today, including figurative, cubist, abstract, and digital styles.

The illustrations, paintings, collages and photos, exhibited salon-style, highlight the wide array of young people’s often-joyous creativity. Portraits reveal faces that are thoughtful, serious, and occasionally sad. Dragons, skeletons, landscapes and animals are popular. And a few dozen well-crafted sculptures made of ceramics, papier mâché and other materials depict busts, animals, masks, jars, vases, a roller skate, a cake, a rooster and a giraffe head.

Among the portraits is Expressively Frida, a clever likeness of Frida Kahlo by Ginesis Vera (Grade 7). Persian Coca by Yekta Chinichian (Grade 12) depicts a traditionally dressed Middle Eastern woman selling Coca-Cola in an elaborately detailed setting. Self Portrait Picasso Style by Emie An (Grade 1) shows a girl with an askew nose, oddly shaped eyes, a heart tattoo, and multi-colored hair—all in Picasso’s cubist style. Remy Chiu (Grade 5) pays homage to the artist in Picasso Inspired Face, by cleverly using cardboard to achieve three-dimensionality.

Dragon Snake by Rosie Hooper (Grade 5)—one of several dragon artworks on view—shows an intricate, scary dragon face extending from a snake body. Tristan De Villiers’ (Grade 5) Vibrant Dragon Mosaic depicts a dragon’s purple face with eyes blazing, fangs growing from its cheeks, extended ears and antlers. A gleeful dragon with a long red tongue and multi-colored feathers is the focus of Jayleen Olivares’ (Grade 9) Brown Pride. And Purple Dragon’s Eye by Savannah Kelly (Grade 4) features one large expressive eye of a dragon staring intently at viewers.

A compelling skeleton in this exhibition is Dressed to Express by Ivy Olivas (Grade 11). Its deft penmanship reveals four elaborately dressed skeletons, looking cool while lounging, with their bones and clothing demarcated against a vortex background. Traveler by Apocalipsis Camacho (Grade 7) is a humorous rendering of a skeleton, casually dressed in a scarf and sombrero, holding onto a bottle while roaming in a field— perhaps heading to a better land.

One of the most attractive works in this exhibition is Railway to Hana by An Do (Grade 10). It depicts a colorful train ambling down a narrow street with clotheslines above and open windows that reveal colorfully decorated apartments. A particularly cute drawing, Cat with Fish Bowl by Hazel Baron (Grade 1), shows a large yellow cat reaching for three fish. Perhaps one of the cleverest works here is the digitally designed Robots by Sarah Hu (Grade 12), which depicts two robots standing in a space station, the taller one holding onto a pitchfork, mimicking Grant Wood’s often copied painting, “American Gothic.” And the cubist-inspired Piece by Piece, created by fourth and fifth graders, overlooks the entire exhibition with a fierce lion with wildly unkempt fur, one green and one blue eye.

The Junior Art Exhibition promotes art education and self-expression while offering young artists the opportunity to display their talents to a wide audience. It further confirms the indispensable role and importance of art instruction today and of its dedicated art teachers.