Cove teen’s art beats thousands, wins spot on statewide calendar

By LYNETTE SOWELL 
Cove Leader-Press 

Mallory Casto, a senior at Copperas Cove High School, recently learned that her art will be included in the 2020 Don’t Mess With Texas calendar, to be distributed statewide courtesy of Keep Texas Beautiful. 
KTB, along with the Texas Department of Transportation, holds an annual art contest for a calendar, and requests art submissions from students in all grades from across the state.
For Casto, it involved quick work to create a painting. 
“I found out of the competition through my mother the night before submissions ended,” Casto said, who went to work right away with her acrylic paints. 
She created the up-close landscape image of a bluebonnet that grew through a cup in a field. 
“I liked the idea of a flower breaking through litter and overgrowing it,” Casto said. “I chose the bluebonnet for my plant due to it being our state flower.”
The painting took her around 25 minutes or so to complete, and when learning she’d been named one of the winners, she said she was both elated and surprised to win.
Along with her artwork being framed, Casto received a gift basket of prizes courtesy of H-E-B and Buc-ee’s. 
The 2020 Don’t Mess With Texas calendar features the artwork by 14 students from across Texas, with 12 designs each assigned to a month, and two other designs for the front and back covers. 
Casto’s art, along with 13 other entries, was chosen by Keep Texas Beautiful and the Texas Department of Transportation from among 3,407 entries submitted by Texas students from 308 schools. 
The other students with art selected for the calendar are Aubrey Thomas (Corpus Christi), Armeen Binte Jafry (Sugarland), Lihan Zheng (Katy), Brittlee Garcia (Edinburg), Ailce Won (Dallas), Nhi Trong (Brownsville), Sarah Pak (Leander), Rukhsara Islam (Fort Worth), Nahyun Kim (Houston), Grace Swenson (Allen), Shanyn Gutierrez (Whitehouse), Brianna Garza (San Antonio), Juliana Garza (Cedar Park).  
Keep Texas Beautiful is now accepting 2020 calendar requests at https://ktb.org/artcontest.