At age 14, Leah Sands will soon teach a grant-funded art lesson, called Art Rocks, at the Evans County Library. Aimed at youth 12 and up, the class is free to participants. The funding takes the form of a $541 grant from the Grassroots Arts Program through the Georgia Council for the Arts, matched by half that amount in local contributions. The class is scheduled for 4:00 – 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 18, but students need to sign up at the library in advance.

Art Rocks isn’t just a catchy name for a class. It identifies the genre. Leah paints rocks to look like animals. She started about two years ago after her grandmother, Barbara Sands, gave her a book by “rock artist” Linn Welford as a Christmas present. “The book kind of gets you started on the basic animals, and then you can start looking and taking pictures of animals, and you can kind of see the design and the colors in them and you can paint on pretty much any rock you want to,” Leah says.

A home-schooled ninth grader, Leah is the oldest of the four daughters of Chad and Melissa Sands. After her grandmother’s gift got her started, other family members and friends have encouraged Leah in her art by giving her rocks to paint. “Most of these were kind of given to me,” she said. “I had, like, little pebbles that I started with, and then when my family would go on trips I’d ask them to bring back rocks, like from a river bed or something, and I would paint them, too. Usually I would give them back as presents.”

Leah has painted about 30 rock animals so far. A large selection of them are now on display in a case at the front of the library. They range from cute little guinea pigs up to a lifelike likeness of her grandmother’s dog Marcel, painted on a plate-size stone. Most are painted on individual rocks the size of a fist or smaller.
Subjects include a tiger and other wild cats, a house cat, a pair of pandas, a mother penguin looking down at her baby who is painted on the same stone, a snake, a raccoon, and others. For her giraffe Leah did a tiny bit of sculpting as well as painting, gluing on pebbles and smoothing with wood filler to form the creature’s long neck.

Rock art holds other possibilities than just animals, she says. In her books, Linn Welford has also given instructions for painting plants on rocks to create an unusual kind of rock garden. Asked if she considers herself an artist, Leah says, “I guess so.” But she is talented in science, too, and at this point doesn’t plan to go to art school. “I actually haven’t really considered going into art as my profession,” she said. “I have a really big interest in science and all the things I’m learning in my biology classes right now, so I’m thinking I would take that as a career and this would be kind of a side hobby.”

She is looking forward to teaching the Art Rocks class. If her students show enough interest, there may be a second session within the grant-funded program. Leah’s mother said she’s excited about the Art Rocks class.
“I think Leah is just going to get blessed by being able to share her talent with other kids and I think it’s going to be a good experience for her,” said Mrs. Sands. A Grassroots Arts Program grant is available to every Georgia county each year, says Susan Willcox, who prepared the grant application. She and Connie Cavender represent Evans County on the program’s regional advisory board. They, Geri Wasdin, Leah and the library’s Melinda Hodges have worked together on the planning. “Generous donations by citizens and business owners in the local area” provided the matching funds to make this year’s two Grassroots projects possible, Willcox said. The second grant, for $1,500 with a $750 local match, is for a project called Blue Skies. The ceiling of the children’s section of the Evans County Library will be painted sky blue, with children and donors to paint clouds in various shapes on the ceiling panels.