Featured Artist – Amanda Yu

View more of Yu’s work on pages 10, 13, and 20

Amanda YuFeatured Artist

Amanda Yu is a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. She would describe herself as reserved and creative. Yu spends a lot of time dedicated to her passion for art. Besides being enrolled in AP 2D Art and Design and a member of National Art Honor Society, she spends her free time interacting with other artists online.

Pieces from her Advanced Placement Art sustained investigation can be found throughout the magazine. Her focus was the portrayal of average high school troubles. Yu said that making art is a way for her to express her complex emotions in a visual media.

Yu hopes to pursue a career that would be financially sustainable as well as enjoyable and creatively fulfilling. “I don’t want to be a starving artist, you know?” Yu said.

Yu noted various inspirations for her art including friends, artists online, and various animation styles. Specifically, the TV show Stephen Universe and the artist @cryptidw00rm on Twitter and Tumblr have inspired her artistic style throughout the years.

We asked Yu if she had any advice for aspiring artists.

“Practice every day. It is perfectly OK if it doesn’t look good, this is just the beginning. Practice,” she said.

Colophon

Artifex is published using Adobe InDesign CC 2022, Adobe Photoshop CC 2022 on one Apple MacBook Pro. Artifex was printed by the SunSentinel. Three hundred copies were printed and distributed to the student body (about 3,570) for free.

The cover is printed on 100-pound coated cover paper. The interior pages are printed on 60-pound offset stock paper. All 71 pages are printed in full color. Copy is set in 10-point Georgia font. Art bylines are set in 14-point Supa Mega Fantastic Caps font, 10-point Supa Mega Fantastic Thin font, and 7-point Georgia font. Headline and Literature byline sizes vary but are set in Supa Mega Fantastic Caps and Supa Mega Fantastic Thin fonts. Folios are set in 37-point Supa Mega Fantastic Caps font.

Artifex is a member of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, the Florida Scholastic Press Association, and the National Scholastic Press Association. The 2021 Artifex was an NSPA Pacemaker Finalist. It was rated All-Florida by FSPA, First Class with three Marks of Distinction in Concept, Design, and Photography, Art, and Graphics by NSPA, and Gold Medalist with All-Columbian Honors in Essentials, Verbal, and Visual category by CSPA.

Editorial Policy

Staff

Artifex is Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s Literary-Art magazine. The main purpose of Artifex is to provide student writers, artists, and photographers with the opportunity to publish their creative work.

Any student in grades 9-12 may submit writing, art, or photography for consideration. Submissions are considered blindly, without author or artist names. Editors read all submissions and sort them into “yes,” “no,” and “maybe” folders. Selected writing submissions are “paired” with art submissions based on thematic connection. An effort is made to ensure that pieces from a diverse group of students are included, and not just many submissions from a few students. The type of art and writing included each year is entirely dependent on the submissions by the student body.

The staff reserves the right to edit grammatical errors and spelling mistakes without the author’s permission. The staff does not edit artwork but will choose elements from the artwork to use as embellishments to the spread design. Authors, artists, and photographers, retain the copyright of all printed submissions but grant Artifex the right to publish them initially and use them in the future for any promotional purposes.

The ideas and opinions expressed in Artifex reflect the individual writer’s and artist’s thoughts, as the magazine serves as a forum for student artistic expression.

Editor-in-Chief - Lybah Haque Design Editor - Reese Lansman* Submissions Editors - Gabriela Bravo and Nikita Nangia Staff - Aisha Hashmi, Kayla Gamm, and Ethan Flores Rothmund Adviser - Melissa Falkowski *All layouts were designed by Reese Lansman The Artifex editorial board and staff are part of the Creative Writing III-IV Honors courses at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which are for credit courses. However, the literary magazine is mostly completed after school as an extra-curricular activity.

Editor’s Note

Special Thanks

We are eternally grateful for all of your submissions to Artifex this year and look forward to continuing to publish your works in the years to come, despite any conditions we may face. If your piece did not make it into the magazine this year, please do not be deterred from submitting again. Upon taking all submissions into consideration, we had to select those which fit most closely with our theme and further narrowed our choices due to the limited number of pages we were able to publish.

Next year, we hope to see artists and writers, both old and new, contributing to our publication. If you are interested in getting your work published, submit your work to the Google Forms sent out by litmagmsd@gmail.com.

Art has been a driving force in our world since the very beginning. From cave art to Victorian oil paintings, from Picasso to Frida Kahlo. It encourages us to keep creating and innovating; motivating the world to keep changing. Just as the world kept going round despite the COVID-19 Pandemic, so did the amazing and imaginative minds of artists that kept creating work that continued to inspire and bring the world together. During the past year, despite being back together, there was an unimaginable gaping hole that was left in our lives due to the pandemic. But piece by piece, the artists mended that hole, connecting hearts and minds all across the world to bring peace and change.

The goal of Artifex will always be to allow students to express themselves in the best ways they know, be it through art, photography, or writing. Until we meet again, never stop creating, and continue to change the world, one ink drop at a time.

Aspecial thanks to the Lawrence A. Sanders Foundation, Inc. for patronizing the arts for the last 14 years and allowing Artifex to display the literary and artistic talent of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s student body. We are incredibly grateful to our advisor, Melissa Falkowski, for guiding us in the production of this year’s magazine. She is the glue that keeps this publication running; the ringmaster to our crazy little circus. Without her, we never would have been able to complete this magazine.

An extra special thanks to our staff members for working so hard to get the magazine finished. From the long days after school to the long nights without coffee, from stressing over the theme to debating over divider copies; without their efforts, this book would not be finished and of the quality that it is. This one goes out to Team Yolk and all the blood, sweat, and tears they put into this magazine. And last but certainly not least, a huge thanks to all of our remarkably talented students who sent in their art, photography, and writing for this year’s issue of Artifex.