Part of my story is much like yours, my art teacher suggested to me and my friends that there was an art camp nearby that only takes in a small number of entrants and we were all super excited about, well low and behold my friends took the applications but never turned them in, so when I got accepted and told them they told me they weren't going... I was really bummed because I have horrible social anxiety and general distaste for most humans so I was like... uhg. The camp cost money and my mom had already paid so I was obligated to go. I knew it was based at a wetland sanctuary and so I was happy it was to do with animals and stuff because I love animals! In fact that's why I've a vegetarian(yes it's important to the story...)
Now it should be said my art is not masterpieces, it's silly and kiddy, and I work mostly with like colored pencils and MSPaint... so it's not like amazing. I honestly knew very little about the camp going into it, I just heard "art camp" and knew I wanted to go. Well it turned out it was an art camp based on Duck Stamps, which are stamps with art pieces of ducks and geese and help preservation to protect our native species. And all of the entrants of the art camp were amazing traditional artists who made amazing realistic paintings, and at least half of them had PLACED to have their art on the stamps in the competitions... and two of them actually had their art on the stamps... There were only 10 people at the camp. and 7 of them were Asian, all of them were the amazing traditional artists. There was one other white girl and she was a photographer, so it was nice there was someone who was ALSO in the wrong place(even though the camp was described as for artists of any medium.)
As soon as my mom dropped me off I didn't want to be there, because as well as preserving wildlife, they also were avid hunters... the entire cabin was covered head to toe with dead animals, including but not limited to, ducks, geese, bucks, a giant warthog, a few native large cats (bobcat, mountain lion), a ZEBRA carpet, like a legit zebra flayed out, coyote pelts... etc etc. (I am OK with taxidermy now, but back then I was mortified.) In my application I had noted I was vegetarian in the dietary restrictions, and this to them meant "cheese and pb" like that's all I had there... there was some fruits and like
one of the meals over the
three day camp had sides I could eat. Obviously they'd never encountered a vegetarian before.
It was super awkward because on the first day we introduced ourselves and had to show our art... and I was just SO nervous being it I hated presenting things in classes to people I know, this was in a strange place, with strangers, surrounded by dead animals staring at me, and everyone else there was a master painter, even the photography girl was like, professional photographer status. So it was embarrassing to show my crappy art pieces I brought... I ended up bunking with the photographer and we got along well thankfully and we read Edgar Allen Poe to each other each night, it was neat.
The art part was actually really amazing in
most aspects, they had really nice point and shoot cameras for us to use, the kinds with the fancy zoom lenses and we'd go out in the marshes early morning and take loads of pictures, it got me really into photography actually. We played art games at the cabin, and I actually won several because I was WAY better at fast drawing gestures when they were all about attention to detail, so I won really amazing (read: expensive) art supplies, like a really high class watercolor set, brushes, and a giant thing of prismacolors. We would go on little nature hikes and drive throughs of the marshlands in these big vans with the doors open so we could shoot out of them with our cameras, we learned about a lot of native birds and actually saw eagles and rare falcons as well. My favorite birds were the cinnamon teal ducks and buffleheads because they're really really gorgeous. We got to whittle/carve our own mini-decoys. And I had a breathtaking experience when we were sent out into a section alone on a trail, there was 10 minutes in between each of us so there was nobody around us when we went, and I got to a part of the trail where it was looking over a large area filled with water, stuffed to the teeth with geese, and right when I had squatted down and lined up a shot, an eagle flew over and spooked the geese and I got to experience THOUSANDS of geese taking off all at once, it was honestly so amazing.
There was a few times that times weren't so good, a part of the "learning" about the birds was a bit too hands on for me... the directors had gone out and freshly killed several geese and butchered them in front of us, everyone else was crowded around outside but I went and sat around the building with one of the counselors that I kind of had a crush on and talked with him, so I mean it wasn't all bad... They also took us to a larger building with MORE taxidermy animals, I walked in and then walked out... And on the last day of the camp they were trying to get us to work for them basically, like making projects to get more people involved with the Duck Stamps program and stuff but I wasn't about to go and hand out Zines about ducks at my school... no thanks.
So I mean while it was a neat experience my favorite thing from it was the disc of photos I took out there. Gunna stick in a little spoiler:
