College students competed in display

Window Walk

be up until Jan. 2. The students competed for $2,500 to $1,000 in scholarship prizes from Silicon Labs. Little Red Riding Hood by Devon Brownlow and Skyler McIntosh won first place. Lori Navarrette was runner-up with the Invocation of Spring. Brownlow and McIntosh also took second with the Little Mermaid and third went to Lara Hincapi for Rapunzel.

To participate, theater students had to create a proposal with a budget 0f less than $500. That inspired creative uses of materials: They made foam look like wood, Styrofoam balls look like a person’s head, CDs look like mermaid scales, felt pieces look like tree leaves.

They also learned that some things are not as simple as they appear. Brownlow spent a week and a half getting the look of the wolf’s mask right. She used cereal boxes, rolled-up newspapers, paper towels and paper to create the head. Spraypainted paper and blue lights create the look of fur. Brownlow, who graduated from St. Edward’s with a theater degree last week, says the wolf’s head was the most difficult part of the Little Red Riding Hood scene. “Experiencewise, this stuff makes you or breaks you,” she says. “It was a blast.”

Students spent most of the semester planning. Once they knew which store they would be decorating, they had to alter the design to fit that store and to work with the store’s needs. For Brownlow and her partner McIntosh, that meant working with Austin Rocks to incorporate the store’s mannequins and making the trees in the woods as thin as possible so people could see through the window into the store.

For Rachel Atkinson, who did Peter Pan at Luxe Apothetique, working with the store meant decorating a larger window than she had planned and bringing some of the store’s merchandise into the window design. Atkinson, who is working on her master’s of fine arts in theater design at UT, says she loved working with the store employees, who The results are in. Conan’s Pizza on 29th Street, with its end-ofthe world Christmas mural in honor of the Mayan calendar’s end, has won the Austin Independent Business Alliance’s Holiday Window Shopping Contest. Read more about that contest, statesman.com/style. gave her good suggestions of what they wanted. “The window is stronger because of it,” she says.

Students put personal touches and winks in their windows. Eileen Chaffer and her partner Gena Castillo, both theater majors at St. Edwards who graduated last week, created C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.” Fans of the book will see Mr. Thomas’ scarf on the lamp and Turkish delight in the window among other elements of the story.

Chaffer says she originally designed the wardrobe to be more like a portal into a store, but when they learned they were assigned a vacant store window, they redesigned with a foam wardrobe that looks like wood. Chaffer did two windows last year but says this one is her favorite. She’s putting this experience and school to work with an internship in the costume shop at New York Theatre Workshop.