Christy O’Neil, the sculpture/pottery teacher at Whitefish High School, and Tara Brown, a second-grade teacher at Muldown Elementary, recently collaborated on a project that is at once adorable and profound. 

Eleven high school art students and 20 second-graders read “How I Met My Monster,” a book by Amanda Noll, about a boy named Ethan who finds several friendly monsters under his bed, each vying to become Ethan’s personal monster. 

The second graders then imagined what their own monsters would be like and made drawings of the creatures. 

“My monster is a heart-shaped monster with long claws, and he has braces, and he has a squiggly tail,” second-grader Eleanor Wallace said proudly. “He’s kind of mean to some people if they don't be nice to him but he’s nice to me,” 

It seems unusual that a monster would have braces, but the explanation makes it all perfectly clear. 

“One time he ate something that wasn't supposed to be eaten, and he went to the dentist, and he just had to have braces because it corrected his tooth,” she said, smiling. 

The drawings were delivered to the high school sculpture class where students recreated them in clay, as accurately as possible. 

“It was a great collaboration, and it challenged my students to properly engineer someone else’s work,” O’Neil said. “My students sometimes didn’t like where the eyes were or how the mouth looked or didn’t like how many arms there were, so it was a good lesson in letting go of that control -- it wasn’t about them. 

“It was a commission of sorts, and they nailed it,” she boasted. 

While the project stretched the skills of the high schoolers, it was equally beneficial for the younger students. 

“It was so much fun to see the second graders and high school students work together on this project," Brown said. “The second graders really enjoy having a chance to team up with older students.” 

When the clay monsters were finished, the high schoolers walked the 3-D monster artworks to Muldown and presented them to the second graders. 

“I was really impressed when I saw the finished monsters,” Brown said. 

The drawings were detailed and fantastical. One resembled a cat with eight legs; another looked like a tin man with thorns, and one appeared to have a pig’s face and a dragon’s body. There was no shortage of scary teeth, horns, wings and tails. 

“My monster has dice eyes and it's a cat and it's a friendly monster,” second grader Aurora Kober said. “I got the stripes because my cat ... she has these stripes like that.” 

She added that her cat monster has a deep voice, then demonstrated by making a grumbling growl like a hippo. 

Ambrose Richardson drew Concon, a soccer-playing monster, wearing a number 9 jersey. Concon also sports jagged teeth and long claws. The blue beast will have other ceramic friends when Richardson puts him “next to my other clay things,” that he made in his grandma’s shop. 

Rowan Kuntz drew his colorful, pointy-headed monster to show two things he likes. 

“I made it because my favorite animal is a unicorn,” he said. “And I like rainbows.” 

The clay sculptures depict the smallest details, match colors precisely, replicate zigzags on arms and tails, and have carefully placed horns and teeth. They even capture the overall feeling, or personality, of the creatures. 

Senior Josie Minton was responsible for building a monster that appeared especially fuzzy in the drawing. She used a combination of several paint colors to denote the texture. 

“There was a cotton candy monster, and I feel like I got that one pretty down to a tee,” said Minton. 

Most high schoolers completed two monsters, and Minton’s second ogre caused a bit of trouble. O’Neil explained that at one point during the sculpting process, she returned Minton’s monster for adjustments to make it more true to the drawing. 

"It had teeth and it also had a tongue, and I just didn’t do it,” Minton confessed. “I was changing it, and I shouldn’t have been changing it.”  

The sculptors struggled with logistics as well as artistic freedom. Sophomore Mason Loeffler ran into some difficulty with a sea creature. 

“Probably the hardest part was, especially for ... the unicorn mermaid -- there were so many tiny details that I had to do, and some of them were so tiny to score and slip on,” said Loeffler. “It was hard, but I enjoyed it, too. I tried to pay attention to the details.” 

The mermaid monster also required some structural problem solving. It was drawn standing upright on a small tail, but when recreated in clay, it had to be built in a different position. 

“We angled it so it would be lying on its side almost -- the wings towards the back -- so it could stand better,” Mason added. “Yes, the mermaid had wings, too.” 

Junior Sophia Crist said her monster drawing featured spikes, but she knew clay doesn’t lend itself to such fine modeling, so she chose to draw the delicate protrusions after the firing. 

“It's super fun to see how creative they are, but it's definitely hard to match the details,” Crist said of the second graders imaginative works. “It was super fun to try the challenge that they were giving us.” 

Junior Ayslin Johnson said she and her classmates often wanted to change the colors chosen by the second graders because they were not what the older students would choose. Despite the difficulties, they knew they had to stick to what was on the paper. 

Johnson also had a brief issue getting the cat monster’s tail just right, but she would always defer to the original artist’s vision and refer to the drawing. 

“I would always have it right next to my monster,” she said. 

The success of this venture came, in part, from a spirit of collaboration among the high school students who often worked on the sculptures in groups, sharing thoughts and solutions. 

“There was a lot of working together,” said O’Neil. “It [the project] was beyond what I thought it was going to do for them.” 

Johnson said she heard the elementary students exclaiming, “I want to do pottery when I go to high school!” 

The wild success of the monster collaboration has inspired O’Neil and Brown to make the project an annual event.