As students set up their Sketch Wednesday stations in the CUB Gallery on Valentine’s Day, unpacking boxes of artwork, the small space became vibrant with student creativity and passion.

“I thought having a themed one would be fun, so I wouldn’t have to come up with my own theme,” SEB Gallery Director Sarah Sehrt said. “It was already Valentine’s Day, and the space was open, so it ended up working out.”

Besides artwork, SEB also provided heart-shaped cookies and a variety of mocktails named after flowers. They handed out small roses in red and pink, which added to the event’s Valentine’s Day theme.

Junior Nate Collier, a sport management major, displayed sketches of people wearing brightly colored clothes or surrounded by vibrant backgrounds on his table.

“My inspiration is Afrocentric art. I like to focus on portraits of black people and showing expression through … the different faces that I come across,” Collier said. “I just try to express that through my art.”

Collier said most of the people he draws come from pictures or artistic references he finds online, but with his own interpretation and change of details. He said he began drawing when he was about 8.

“I just couldn’t stop myself from there,” Collier said. “I think something about art just kind of caught my interest and then I just started doing it on my own.”

Another artist featured at Sketch Wednesday was Victoria de Leon, a senior majoring in fine arts.

De Leon said she draws her cartoon figures of people by hand, then uploads and re-draws them in Adobe Illustrator.

“I’ve been learning how to do this since high school,” she said. “They offered some classes on how to use Photoshop and Illustrator, so I just remembered it from there.”

She added that some of her illustrations are based on real people. She designed one of her caricatures to resemble herself, but without glasses.

“Another one of them is actually based off of one of my classmates because he had very interesting hair,” she said, “so I kind of designed one of the guys based off of him.”

Freshman zoology major Taylor Leback said her major is important to her artwork, which features highly detailed images of farm animals. She pointed to a picture of a lamb nursing.

“This one was a picture I had taken of a model lamb we had,” she said.

She added that her artwork may take between two hours and a full day to create, depending on her motivation and what she’s trying to accomplish.

Leback said she started taking art classes in seventh grade, which is when her interest in art became more serious. She said she looks through photos, deciding what to draw depending on lighting, texture and mood.

“Then I do a rough sketch when I have an idea and I just kind of go for it and lay it down on paper,” she said, “and then I’ll just slowly start filling details in.”

Sketch Wednesday has been an tradition of the Student Entertainment Board for years. After trying different events last year, Sehrt said that she wanted to bring it back this semester.