Barbara Ingram senior's 'Doodle for Google' win moves her on to national competition

Washington County student Ileana Ekins is one step closer to having her artwork dashed across the computer screens of millions as Wednesday it was announced she advanced to the next round of the Doodle for Google competition.

The senior at Barbara Ingram School for the Arts is one of 55 winners from each state and U.S. territory in the annual competition where K-12 students have the opportunity to create their own version of the Google logo inspired by a prompt.

Ileana will advance to a nationwide voting round and the winner will have their artwork displayed on the Google homepage in addition to receiving a $30,000 scholarship and securing $50,000 worth of technology for their school.

Google selected Ileana from among thousands of students to advance to the public voting round. Anyone can vote online at doodles.google.com/d4g/ from May 18-25, and Google will announce the five finalists at the end of the month.

A Google spokesperson told The Herald-Mail that the evaluation of the pieces was based on artistic skill, approach to the prompt, the use of letters in the artwork and how the theme was presented in the artwork and in a written statement.

"Our judges were delighted to see the range of creative ways all the students shared their stories of gratitude," the Google spokesperson said.

What was Ileana's celebrated piece?

Her piece titled “Share the Love” worked off the prompt “I am grateful for …”

The work shows her with her parents and four of the seven pets she has at home, including Tiago, the bearded dragon. She said though the piece is different from her usual style, which veers darker with more gore, "it kind of just came naturally."

"I'm grateful for my parents, I mean, you know, they're the ones that raised me and made me become who I am," Ileana said. "So then I was like, well I also like animals — I'm a big animal person, I've got seven at home — so I figured why not do that."

Ileana said she was pushed to enter the competition by her art teacher and only started working on the design one week before the deadline. She said her initial emotion was disbelief when she heard her design was picked over thousands.

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"I just hear people winning this stuff all the time, and you don't really think that you're going to be the one to get it," Ileana said. "And so then when I found out I was like, 'Oh, OK, sure we can go with it.'"

Ileana, a Boonsboro native, said that after high school she will attend Hagerstown Community College before hopefully transferring to a major art school out of state. She wants to be a full-time artist — be it as a video-game designer or an illustrator — and said she sees HCC as the first step.

How the accomplishment was felt locally

Trying to stay humble, Ileana and her family found out about her advancement from Google last week without telling her school. When Barbara Ingram Principal Rob Hovermale found out earlier this week, he held a surprise assembly to celebrate.

"She's graduating in a week, so this is a nice send-off, " Hovermale said Thursday. "And it was nice to see the kids all rally behind her, not just the visual art kids, but we have kids in music, theater, dance, computer gaming, everything."

According to Hovermale, this will be the first time the magnet school for the artistically gifted has had a student compete in the competition. He said the goal of the school is not only to nurture these success stories but to "help kids find their way."

"I mean some kids, it's digging out that creativity and turning them into the artists that they know they can be," he said, "and for some kids, it's just finding their path, might not even have anything to do with the arts, but the use of the arts to get there"

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Ileana Ekins' Google doodle qualifies for national voting round