After months of sketching, erasing, and coloring, Art Club will finally be able to send off their finalized portraits of children in a Cambodian orphanage. The project began in September with each art student randomly choosing what child they would make their portrait of. Now, they have up until the end of this week to draw their portrait using whichever medium they want. The goal is to have each portraits collected before finals begin. The 24 portraits will finally be sent to Cambodia on Jan. 1 along with a picture of the artist. Upon receiving their portraits, the children will take another picture posing with their portraits and the photo will be sent back to their respective artists so that they can see the child’s reaction to their gift.

“It’s easy to be cynical in this world we live in today,” Art Club Sponsor Michael Leistner said. “The people in this project are sincere and genuinely good. It shows that there are plenty of good people in the world.”

The portraits are a part of the Memory Project, a nonprofit organization. The Memory Project is an organization in which art students make portraits for disadvantaged children around the world. According to the Memory Project’s mission statement, because many of these children have few personal keepsakes, they try to provide them with special memories that capture a piece of their childhood and try to help the kids see themselves as works of art.

“The best part about the Memory Project is even though I’m not very good at art, this gives me an inspiration to draw because these orphans have nothing,” Reavey said. “Whenever we send the portraits to them, I know they will be happy.

Because the Memory Project is a nonprofit program, there is a $15 fee per portrait to participate in the project. The fee covers postage and remaining money is donated to the orphanage. On average, a total of $1,000 is donated to each orphanage. In order to cover this cost, $300 was donated by StuCo from their annual budget, and the rest was covered by Art Club.

“All of Student Council voted on whether or not to donate the money to the Art Club and, in the end, we all agreed that helping support them with this project was what was best to do,” StuCo President Rowan Pugh said.

The Memory Project was started in the fall of 2004 by Ben Schumaker after he took a trip to an orphanage in Guatemala and learned that most of the children in the orphanages have never seen a picture of themselves.

“To think that a lot of these orphans have never even seen a picture of themselves just really struck me as profound,” Schumaker said. “I always loved drawing portraits of people and I thought it was a very powerful gift to give someone. So, by giving the project to art students it’s just a win-win.”