Published in the Current
Come race day, Beach to Beacon competitors and volunteers, as well as participants in the children’s race, will be wearing shirts designed by Cape students.
The T-shirt designs were developed in a contest open to all Cape Elizabeth students, many of whom participated through their art classes.
Ten-year-old Kylie Tanabe created the design for the children’s T-shirts as part of her fourth-grade class last year, with Pond Cove School teacher Ogden Williams.
“He got us going on drawing the lighthouse,” Tanabe said. She also takes art lessons from her grandmother, and prefers to do tole painting, copying and adapting photographs and paintings. She had painted a lighthouse as a gift for her parents, and drew a similar lighthouse, adding in a small house and other elements to resemble Portland Head Light.
Her father, Keith, said Kylie is “fearless” and always ready to try new things. She recently went on her first upside-down roller-coaster and grinned widely when asked what she thought of it. She will be running the kids’ one-kilometer race on Saturday.
Joanna Wexler will be a senior next year at CEHS, and designed the logo that will be printed on the runners’ and volunteers’ shirts. Her design was also an art class project from school.
In the class, with high school art teacher Richard Rothlisberger, students created thumbnail sketches and then fleshed out their ideas in various mediums.
“We went through many stages,” Wexler said. “It was really open to what you wanted to do.”
Wexler, a cross-country runner and lacrosse player at CEHS, will not run the race this year, as she tried to register after the field was full, but will volunteer.
Her design includes Portland Head Light, as well as a wave and a path with footsteps. “I definitely wanted to include the beacon,” Wexler said.