Many ISU students spend thousands of hours hard at work in the Design Building, and although the building may seem foreign to outsiders, students from all majors in the College of Design think of its nooks and crannies as their home away from home.

In the studios, students form lasting friendships and communities where they can share their ideas, help one another out and critique others’ work – whether it’s asked for or not.

Goofing off is the key to keeping one’s sanity during difficult projects – projects that force some students to go without sleep for days at a time just to make sure they’ve created something to be proud of.

The students of the art and design program can often be found working in the basement of the Design Building at almost any hour as the rest of the campus sleeps, quietly crafting, molding, painting and drawing.

Below are three of the many art and design students mixing their craft with creativity.

Willa Thornburg

“I like to push the envelope and do something that hasn’t been done before,” says Thornburg, junior in art and design with an emphasis in metals. “I want to make people get that feeling you get when you see something that you’ve never seen before.”

Thornburg is sitting at a workstation in a cluttered room chatting and working with two other students. She says she is working on a casting project and takes out a chunk of wax she has molded into the shape of a fashionable ring design. Later, a mold will be made out of the wax and silver will be poured into it, which will make the final piece.

“I took a jewelry class in high school and liked it, but I started here in biology,” Thornburg says. “My mom is a professor at ISU – not in the design program – and she always told me she thought I would be good in art and design. But I always said, ‘No, that’s where the weird people are.'”

Thornburg says she liked working with her hands, but hadn’t thought of designing jewelry as something to do with her life until she started in the program.

“I get my inspiration from my favorite artists, such as Elliot Pujol,” she says. “We get an assignment, then I look at the artists’ pieces that I like and get my inspiration from that, and the ideas start to come.”

One of Thornburg’s favorite pieces is a ring she made with a square part on it in which she planted grass. Another favorite is a silver and slate pendant she designed.

Thornburg has had several pieces in local shows and has the pendant in the Studies in Creativity annual student exhibit at the Memorial Union until Dec. 5. She plans to go to graduate school and says she hopes to have her own gallery in a big city where she can show and sell her and others’ artwork.

“When a piece actually gets done after a lot of work, it’s a really great feeling,” she says. “Knowing that will come is what keeps me going every day.”

Jacob Snowbarger

Just down the hall, Snowbarger, senior in art and design with an emphasis in woods, spends many hours creating pieces of furniture.

“It’s the medium I’m most comfortable with,” he says. “We can’t get by without it, and I like to express myself and how we live with it sometimes by making statements related to the community of furniture makers.”

His pieces include his “skewed perspective” pair of small cabinets, in which one cabinet looks traditional but is hard to open, and the other has articulated legs with a door that doesn’t close all the way.

“The one with the door that doesn’t close encourages people to explore it and think about how we use furniture as opposed to the one that is uninviting with the door that is so hard to open,” he says.

Snowbarger said he doesn’t always create statement-making furniture. Sometimes he does pieces for clients, in which he makes furniture to fit their needs.

“I emphasize craftsmanship, and I’m very passionate about it,” he says.

Snowbarger has experience outside of Iowa State from the College of the Redwoods in California, where he attended class for nine hours a day, six days a week for a year.

“It confirmed my belief of how passionate I was about this,” he says.

Snowbarger also has a piece at the Memorial Union, for which he got best in show for a women’s sewing chair.

He has had pieces in various other local shows, including the “loaded liquor cabinet” that has a tipsy look with no right angles.

Even with all the accomplishments, it’s not all work and no play for Snowbarger and his fellow students.

“We build goof-off things, too, like sling shots,” he says. “When you see the same people year after year, it creates a community here of 60 to 70 people who all know each other within this huge college.”

Aaron Doerder

Aaron Doerder, senior in art and design with an emphasis in metals, often sits across the room from Thornburg.

“The work I do intrigues me, but it is a lot of time and work and that is a big drawback,” Doerder says. “I, like many other students, spend 60 hours a week in the studio, and it’s a very competitive field to be in.

“Probably only my parents will want to buy my pieces,” he adds with a laugh.

On the contrary, Doerder has had his pieces, which are made by forming and fabricating metal, at the Octagon Center for the Arts, an art museum in Mason City, in the Memorial Union and many other local shows. He is an expert in metalsmithing, using hammers of many shapes and sizes to beat and form what starts out as a flat sheet of metal into a variety of shapes. He makes his own hammers and each one creates different marks on the metal.

“Ultimately, I would like to teach it because processes like mine are dying and my professors tell me to continue it by teaching people to do it,” Doerder says. “It’s not just about making money to me.”

Doerder says he pushes the metal to its limits, and says it is like a conversation with the piece of silver as to where he is taking it next.

“I’ll never give up on it or be done with it, and I am always trying to be better,” Doerder says.