Powell High School art student Alexis Buller has spent hours each day meticulously taking measurements in order to build Powell High’s second Viking longship.

Buller is not fond of traditional art classes, she said, but needed an art class to graduate, so she enrolled in vocational art, an alternative art class where students often opt to work on the annual project.

“I get to work with my hands, actually be active and not get lost trying to draw something I don’t find very interesting,” she said.

Each year Powell High School’s art students create a large scale model and display room, but this year they’re going back to the basics.

The art program’s initial large scale projects were built out of a desire from students and teachers alike to fill empty space in Powell High’s breakout rooms (open air spaces built into the hallways), and an admiration for the decorations hanging from the ceiling at a restaurant. Following the state art competition in 2012, Powell High art teacher Jim Gilman and his students were having their annual dinner and talking about the decorations hanging from the ceilings in Sanford’s Casper location; the Wyoming based restaurant chain is known for large and medium scale models that hang from the ceiling and other carefully curated clutter.

“They wanted to come home and do that … so we came home and we built the biplane,” Gilman said.

They weren’t initially year-long projects, they were just larger projects the students could look forward to at the end of the year.

Roughly a decade ago Powell High’s art program built a dragon skeleton — it was one of the first projects the program took on and the first chosen by the students, said Gilman. 

Before the dragon menaced the skies of Powell High’s purple hallway the art students built a Viking longship (their second large scale project.) Building the ribs of the dragon is what gave the students experience to work on more complicated projects like the submarine, Gilman said. Now it’s time to see what can be done to improve the Viking display after all these years.

“This is one of the last areas now that does not have the murals and the extensive project base that we've done over the years, so that's why we're tackling this one again,” Gilman said. 

The dragon will be revived thanks to the students patiently using building materials to create bumpy flesh, and a second longship is painstakingly being built to join the original and half of a third longship may protrude from the wall. 

Buller pitched the idea of the third boat to Gilman and had originally suggested using the original boat for the wall buster.

Gilman said these projects have revitalized his teaching and tapped into student buy-in like he’s never seen.

Outside of student buy-in, Gilman has had support and interest outside of Powell High School. He posts the progress for each project and as a result has had people send annual donations to the school district, along with tools, supplies and the occasional addition to the project through ideas or memorabilia. A history professor asked that the art class include a diorama of a famous Viking siege against the English to which they have happily obliged. 

Like Buller, fellow student Wyatt Blackmore  took vocational arts in order to graduate and has taken a liking to working on the longship.

Blackmore has never worked on one of the projects before other than lending a helping hand in the welding shop. This year he’s been handling the assembly of the longship’s ribs, while looking forward to vocational arts taxidermy unit in the second part of this year.

“[Students] get to take ownership in it, they see ownership in it, they want to be part of it, it forms a team, basically their friendships develop over this [project],” Gilman said.  “I just think it's a magical way to teach.”