🏅2026 Finalist – Student Art Exhibition

The Impact of Poverty
on Children

Zjbrinnah Torres
Grade 9 — SD School of Creative and Performing Arts

In the Artist’s Words
I wanted the message to be clearer and stronger by showing the reality of childhood poverty

For this project, I created a watercolor painting with colored pencils lightly added to enhance parts of my art piece, like the brick wall as the background, the person who is holding out their hand to give the kid money, and the kid’s shirt. And I used a calligraphy pen with ink to create the black outlines of my piece. This project is meant to creatively express the real issues of the world through art for the San Diego Film Festival.

My issue is based on poverty and how it mostly affects children under the age of 5.

For this art piece, I originally was going to paint a kid sitting on a railing with their back turned facing a city. This was an idea I wanted to incorporate in as my final project because of my interpretation of . I interpreted that the kid was looking at the city, which is more fancy, brighter, etc. because they want to be there someday or see themselves there in the future.

I resorted to painting a kid sitting against a brick wall and a dirty floor with a person’s arm shown in the image to put money in the kid’s cup. I felt like resorting to this because the message is clearer and stronger in this way.

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🖌 Medium — Watercolor + India Ink
🎨 Theme — Poverty