MacArthur High School art students will take an architectural tour of the world next year and they invite you to go along.

Cost of the tour is only $15 with stops at 14 sites in the U.S. and overseas, including some mythical cities. The “tour” is actually a 2027 calendar being sold as a fundraiser with drawings students in Catherine Plowman’s art class made last Spring.

Plowman said this is the second year her classes have sold the calendars; gnomes were featured last year. She said she got the idea when she was cleaning out her father-in-law’s house and found a gnome calendar.

“I thought it would be a great fundraiser,” she said.

The activity is the final project for her art students, who spent about a month researching and completing their drawings. Plowman said students had free choice about what they wanted to draw and a few students chose mythical cities such as Gotham City, New York, and The Daily Planet Building in the fictional city of Metropolis, Delaware.

Other architectural features include the Taj Mahal in India, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Big Ben in London, and St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, Australia.

One drawing closer to home is a scene of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and is the creation of Karleigh Essex. The drawing features black dripping from the towers and splotches of blue in the background.

Essex said she is intrigued by the 9/11 attacks and chose them for her project.

“I’m good at drawing, so I thought I would do the Twin Towers. Water colors and architecture are the perfect match,” Essex said. “I know that a few planes were hijacked and the Twin Towers were hit and both went down. A cool fact is my stepdad has all the newspapers from that day.”

Essex said she scanned through the newspaper clippings, though they were brittle with age.

The subject matter also is personal for Essex — her stepfather was in Philadelphia on 9/11 and saw the smoke and dust from the towers and her mother was on a school trip to New York.

Essex said it was all the names of those who lost their lives that made the greatest impression on her.

“It’s just sad to me, those lives changed forever,” she said. “To me, it’s trying to keep that memory alive.

“A lot of Gen Z’ers don’t learn about bombings or other wars. That’s just sad to me. We don’t know enough about the history that makes up the world,” Essex said, adding her generation is more interested in technology than history. “I am a little bit of a victim of that, but I want to learn. I ask my dad and stepdad all those questions when I want to know something.”

She said in her drawing, the shadows from the towers are bleeding into history. The black is smoke and the blue is the sadness because so many lost their lives and so many families were changed.

Essex said she and her family are planning a trip to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum for a combination 18th birthday and graduation celebration.

Jhazen Angeles also chose a destination she would like to visit one day — the Basilica de la Sagrada in Barcelona, Spain. She said she chose it for two reasons: It took decades to build and she loves to draw details. The church sparked Angeles’ imagination after she saw it featured in a movie.

“It makes me wonder why it’s in that process of building, what is the story behind it, what makes people want to keep going,” Angeles said. “Ever since then, I was looking at it and wanted to draw it and the details. I like drawing stuff with a lot of details. I wanted to challenge myself. It’s one of the places I have been dreaming of visiting.”

Angeles said she researched several photos of the building before deciding what angle to draw.

“This wasn’t my original picture. I had to change it up,” she said, saying she wasn’t satisfied with the first attempt. “It took a week to plan the sketch and another week to draw it. I tried different shading techniques.”

Plowman said last year she raised $350 and has already raised more than that this year although sales have just started. She said proceeds will go to fund “luxuries” for her art students. Last year she bought colored pencils for students’ final projects because “they will blend and layer”.

“If I want high-end, I need a fundraiser, and this buys high-end for me,” Plowman said.

To order a calendar, which was printed by the Lawton Public Schools Media/Technology Center, contact Plowman at catherine.plowman@lawtonps.org.