New district artwork created by TFHS alumna Samantha Kolodziej!
The Gill-Montague Regional School District has new artwork representing the schools and the district, created by Turners Falls High School alumna Samantha Kolodziej! Samantha graduated from TFHS in 2018 and is currently in her senior year at Elms College, majoring in graphic design. Visitors to the Erving Public Library will have seen the exhibit of her “Visit Western Mass” project—a collection of vintage-style travel posters featuring locations around Western Massachusetts. The artwork can also be viewed online. Samantha created this project in a class called “Showcase” during her junior year while travel was restricted due to the pandemic. “I figured, since people couldn’t travel far, I could remind them of the great places in their own backyard,” she said. She began each image by producing a rough sketch of the location, then brought it into Adobe Illustrator to create the final image.
Samantha has been interested in art for as long as she can remember, but her interest in graphic design began during her sophomore year of high school. “The graphic design courses at TFHS helped me out,” she said. “They acted as a sort of pretrial where I could test out and see if I really liked the field. It also helped give me Adobe experience ahead of college which meant I wasn’t starting from scratch.” She decided to major in graphic design because it is a field that has good growth potential and would allow her to be creative and solve problems in a way that stays interesting. After her graduation in May 2022, she’d like to get a job working in a marketing department and at some point may continue on to graduate school so that she can teach design.
The artwork she created for GMRSD is in the same style as her “Visit Western Mass” project—vintage-style posters featuring Hillcrest, Sheffield, Gill, and Great Falls Middle School/Turners Falls High School, as well as a district image which will be featured as the district’s social media profile picture (stay tuned to our social media throughout the year to see the profile picture change with the seasons!).
