Leif Drace a Rising Artist
As Leif Drace enters his final weeks at Huntington High School, teachers say the senior has left his mark academically, artistically and as a fine young man.
One of Mr. Drace’s art pieces was selected this spring for the Long Island’s Best show at the Heckscher Museum. This year he is enrolled in AP 2D Portfolio and Advanced Computer Graphics. “I used the skills learned in pervious art classes, such as Media Arts, Studio and Art, and even Technical Drawing, to create a different sort of art that few students utilize,” the teenager said about his work.
Mr. Drace was recently honored at Huntington High School’s Distinguished Seniors Dinner, which recognized the top twenty percent of the Class of 2010. He’s a bright, mild mannered, well-spoken and hard working teenager.
“For my AP concentration, I simply sketched out different parts for each piece, and then recreated them using Adobe Illustrator,” Mr. Drace said. “Instead of a series of art pieces that show progression through different techniques using a similar theme, I created a storyline, in which a character goes on an adventure to avenge his destroyed village. Each piece depicts a different moment in his adventure, as he gets closer and closer to his goal. However, there is a twist towards the end that puts a spin on the story, and connects the last piece to the first once again; thus creating a cycle.”
The recent show at the Heckscher Museum introduced Mr. Drace’s work to several thousand art lovers who attended the exhibit. “For Long Island’s Best, I took a simplistic [piece], called Two Figures by Lee Adler,” Mr. Drace said. “However, I took my piece to the next level by making my figures robots and giving them personality through the use of detail, yet retained the piece’s innocence via color selection and form.”
Mr. Drace balanced his high school activities in a way that helped create an experience free of some of the usual stress that can accompany these years. He has captained the fencing team and has served as the creative director and contributing cartoonist for The Dispatch, the high school student newspaper.
In the fall Mr. Drace will begin classes at Rochester Institute of Technology. “For my career, I plan on doing something similar to creating 3D environments, characters, and animation sequences for a video game company or a movie company.”
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