Two horizontal photos with black framing around them. On the left, a college professor oversees a student sitting at a wooden bench, using a thin saw on a piece of metal. On the right, a man points to different posters while students stand, looking on, on the other side of the table.

Students explore creativity, art processes during Summer Art and Design Camp

Published Jul 10, 2026 by
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Two incoming East Carolina University freshman passed around sample posters in alum Joshua Vaughn’s poster design class, with 55 other high school students who created and explored the visual arts during this year’s Summer Art and Design Camp.

Held the week of June 14 at Jenkins Fine Arts Center, students participated in workshops with School of Art and Design (SOAD) faculty and other professional instructors, like Vaughn. In addition to poster design, the workshops offered bookmaking and paper arts, 2-D animation, screen printing, reductive relief printing, digital photography, jewelry, logo and brand design, line etching and aqua tinting, film, and analog darkroom photography, giving students a variety of creative experiences.

Laila Paulino will join the SOAD as a freshman this fall. While it was her first time at the art and design camp, Paulino has attended ECU’s Band Day with the color guard. She has enjoyed coming to ECU for these activities to help acclimate to the college experience.

“The times that I’ve come, I just like the culture,” Paulino said. “The art department seemed very welcoming and very nice. They make it inviting so you’re not confined to what you’re specifically doing; that stood out to me.”

Paulino prefers working with mixed media during her own time, and expects to study animation or another focus area related to concept art to inspire a creative career.

“I like the idea of the people who do the behind-the-scenes, the backgrounds of how movies or video games will look,” Paulino said. “To take ideas on paper and make a visual come to life.”

Paulino and Audrey Sisseck, the other incoming SOAD freshman, are both from Jacksonville, N.C. This summer was Sisseck’s third at art and design camp.

“There’s a lot of things you can do,” Sisseck said. “It’s really fun.”

Sisseck has participated in photography and animation multiple times during the summer camp. Coincidentally, she wore a “Dead Poets Society” T-shirt the first day of camp, as Vaughn introduced the poster design class with a quote from the 1989 film starring Robin Williams:

“And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

Vaughn ’12, a freelance designer with nearly 20 years in the industry, called it the quote for the class.

“My observation, having done this as long as I have, is that they are not separate, but they are bridged by graphic design,” said Vaughn, who also designed the camp logo for the last two years.

The class then moved into a discussion about the definition of graphic design and a demonstration of examples from Vaughn’s poster collection, including pieces from music festivals, his time as a student, an informative poster, and a letterpress piece from Hatch Show Print in Nashville, which creates its designs only by hand.

“Once an event passes, this is no longer an advertisement,” Vaughn said. “This is an artifact. This is a piece of history.”

Nextdoor to Vaughn’s class, SOAD animation assistant professor Hilary Huskey introduced students to Adobe Photoshop on Cintiq drawing tablets, sharing how to change drawing settings like line thickness and symmetry. Students were set up to draw characters, using a template Huskey provided or on their own.

“Now the fun part,” Huskey said after the intro. “We get to start drawing.”

In another Jenkins studio, metal design instructor Tim Lazure’s classroom was quiet except for the steady sound of fine metal saws his jewelry students used to cut designs from small, metal plates.

Students across the building learned, explored, and created, sharing their final designs in an exhibition to cap the week. See our video with images from across the workshops, and visit the camp web page to learn more about the 2026 camp, and bookmark the page for 2027.