A menagerie of maps, a plethora of posters and a glut of greenery can be spied in the Yoder, Miller and Kratz dorms this year. As a person keeps looking, more individualized items start materializing. One can find plaster lion heads mounted on walls and displays of flat brimmed hats. Original Goshen College art is harder to come by, but for what it lacks in quantity it is make up for in quality.

Tessa Ray, a first-year, hates white walls and has brought with her three large canvases she painted last year to conquer the barren atmosphere. Two of the paintings have dream-like trees and scenery composed of fanciful colors. At first glance, the other canvas doesn’t look like much: an off-white shade with a swatch of blue on the bottom, though from certain angles one can see the words “Shut up” inscribed in it.

The room of Aaron Bontrager and Jordan Weaver, sophomores, has an otherworldly feel. One wall, completely papered in spray paintings of outer space, is an immediate attention grabber. Bontrager and Weaver created the paintings this summer using advice from YouTube clips that involved mixing colors and working with bowls to create the round planets.

David Pauls, a first-year, has a passion for spray painting. Silhouettes of Bob Marley, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn and Samuel Jackson, among others, are stuck to the walls. Pauls creates all his own stencils, one of which can take up to an hour to make. Pauls hopes to eventually cover the room with his art, so most of his free time is devoted to the creation of stencils.

Wall hangings are not the only way students have decided to show their artsy side in the dorms this year. Sophomore Alma Miller sewed four dolls, each in the likeness of a girl in her quad. Miller had extra fabric lying around over the summer and decided to make caricature dolls of the Harry Potter characters. After completing the Hermione doll, though, Miller said, “I decided I didn’t really want to make seven or eight dolls and instead made something special for our quad.”  So the Hermione doll became Miller and now all four dolls are displayed on a shrine in the room