OTTOVILLE, OH (WLIO) – Hundreds of students from every corner of Putnam County got to show off their artistic talents under one roof on Sunday.

The 11th annual Putnam County Arts Festival featured over 130 musicians and 400 visual artists from K-12. Nearly a thousand students and parents from all nine school districts in the county walked through the paintings, ceramics, and drawings on display before sitting down for a performance by the Honors Band and Choir. The arts don’t always get as much as attention as school sports, but the size of the Arts Festival makes those students feel appreciated and motivated too.

“I think the one thing that I hear from students a lot is building confidence. They feel more confident now, performing in front of a large group or also just being able to play harder music, or in the visual arts portion, they see kind of other kids push them or maybe they come up with an idea and say maybe I’ll try something like that next year,” said Gary Herman, the curriculum coordinator for the Putnam County Educational Service Center.

The best 15 entries to the high school art show are awarded Best in Show ribbons by an impartial guest judge. Fort Jennings junior Alexis Geise earned that honor for her sculpture of Father Time.

“I was just thinking about it and I was like, it would be so cool if I could just like almost like take a part of the face and just completely reconstruct it, make it just almost like gears in his head, like thinking about all the time and stuff like that,” Geise explained.

Each year the festival rotates to be hosted by a different school in the county.