The Victory of the New Kid

CEBU, Philippines - Her winning first place in a poster-making competition in July last year came as a surprise to her classmates. She was, at that time, a new kid in Bankal Elementary School, Lapu-Lapu City, having just transfered from Daet, Camarines Norte, the native place of her parents.

 "My classmates congratulated me. It made me very happy. They had not seen me draw anything (not even on scratch paper) prior to the contest," recalled Nicole Gay Baserdo Licoto. The competition was in line with the observance of Nutrition Month.  It was by it that she gained the confidence of her teachers and won the admiration of her classmates.

There is popular belief that talents are, in part, genetic. But none of Nicole's parents are into drawing or illustration art. Her father is a soldier with the Armed Forces of the Philippines, and her mother is a Kindergarten teacher.

Nicole showed talent on the sketchpad early on, which prompted her parents to send her to a summer arts workshop. This was back when she was a pupil yet at a Carmelites-operated school in their former home place in Camarines Norte.

Nicole thanks her Teacher Teray, Ms. Teresa Reyes, for coaching her. It was in Ma'am Teray's art class that Nicole first learned about the proper use of colors. She learned that a combination of dark and light colors would do a lot in creating perspective in a drawing. It can help highlight and emphasize certain features of the piece. Ma'am Teray also taught her the techniques used by great Filipino painters and sculptors, especially Fernando Amorsolo and Guillermo Tolentino.

Nicole dreams of building houses as a profession. She wants to study what construction materials will effectively adapt to climate change. The girl admits she still has to know "a lot about what is happening to the world." She wants to know, for instance, the different types of materials and building designs that can effectively withstand flooding.

This early, the girl already thinks that houses should be two-storey structures. People shall live upstairs while the ground floor shall be left open as a floodway. "The house color I prefer is peach, because it lightens up our mood," the 11-year-old Grade 5 pupil adds. "Flowers and angels would be very nice décors, because these connect us with nature and heaven."

She likes planets and stars for the subjects of her art. She wants to get familiar with marine creatures, too, so that she would be able to render details of a whale shark - the butanding - the big attraction that helped a lot in putting her former province, Bicol, in the map of interesting tourist destinations in the country. 

Nicole recently competed in an editorial cartooning contest, as official representative of her school. For her contest entry, she used a large pencil as a symbol in her drawing, which showed little pupils struggling to write using the large pencil. It also had beads of sweat dripping from the pupils' brows symbolizing all their hardships at school, she explained.

She didn't win in that contest, she admitted. But she would try to be able to reach the regional level of the same competition sometime soon, saying, "That is my big goal."

Like most girls her age, Nicole has her favorite movie/TV celebrities. She likes the tandem of Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla. She hopes to have them someday to model for her in a painting session.

Talent, as we can see, is the stuff of winners. It helps win contests, as it also helps win friends. Nicole Gay Baserdo Licoto is proof to that.  (FREEMAN)