Doodle for Google: Elementary Student's Dinosaur Art Wins Google Contest
This year's was special.
by Danny PaezFor ten years now, Google has given students from the United States the opportunity to artistically reimagine the company’s logo as a Google Doodle. Hundreds of thousands of young artists from across the country entered to win through the years. Tuesday the tech company announced that Sarah Gomez-Lane, a second-grader from Falls Church, Virginia was the winner of 2018’s Doodle For Google.
She transformed each letter in the Google logo into a dinosaur-inspired drawing. The theme of last year’s contest was “What inspires me…” and Gomez-Lane chose her prehistoric design because she hopes to become a paleontologist. Since it was the tenth anniversary of the competition, Google decided to commemorate the drawing with something special.
Gomez-Lane won $30,000 toward a college scholarship and her Falls Church elementary school was gifted $50,000 to spend on educational tech. To top it off, Google animators and illustrators turned her winning sketch into an interactive Doodle for the first time in the contest’s history.
Gomez-Lane sitting with Swinehart to talk about how Google can animate her drawing.
Official Google Doodler, Nate Swinehart explains that this process involved a creative workshop with Sarah, where he and the team learned how she envisioned each character being portrayed on the site.
“Our task with this doodle was to take Sarah’s artwork and bring it to life,” he says in a statement. “We talked about what she was thinking when she made the characters, what they like what they didn’t like. How do we maintain this pure, childlike but make it move in a way that the user can appreciate?”
Students K-12 can now enter in the 2019 contest that’s has been themed “When I grow up, I hope…” The submission deadline is March 18, each student is limited to one doodle, and each submission must be signed by students’ parent or guardian to be considered. Head to the Doodle for Google’s FAQ page for more details.
Gomez-Lane’s Jurassic doodle will remain on Google’s homepage for all of January 8, but around the same time next year another student creation will be featured on the site.
