Friends, family and students gathered in the second story of the Anheuser-Busch Natural Resources building to attend the School of Natural Resources’ first annual Homecoming Art Show.

The show benefited the Food Bank for Central and Northeast Missouri.

Artwork featured included a variety of mediums — from stained-glass to photographs — and subjects, but all artists displayed their love and passion for nature and the environment, following “The Great Outdoors” theme.

Guests bought tickets through donations to the food bank, and used those tickets to vote for their favorite artwork.

“We picked the theme because we’re outdoorsy,” said Laura Hertel, the coordinator of student resources.

Senior Leslie Smith dropped tickets into several boxes next to her friends’ paintings.

“I really like the variety of mediums chosen,” she said.

Smith said her favorite piece was a painting of a tree with words wrapped around it.

Smith is a friend of Bennett Grooms, a senior who submitted a pen-and-ink profile of a leopard.

“(Art is) a nice change of pace from the sciences,” Grooms said.

He said he explores many different art forms, from short stories to watercolor, and he freelances when he is not in class for Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences.

Grooms’ said his leopard is based on a real-life encounter in Africa.

“I base my art on real life and my experiences,” Grooms said.

Sophomore David Calandro, who created a stained-glass picture of two deer gazing out of an autumn landscape, said he also focuses on wildlife and encounters with nature.

“That’s what comes naturally to me,” he said.

For his stained-glass piece, Calandro cut and clipped each different sizes and pieces from large sheets of colored glass. Calandro estimates that the stained-glass took approximately 600 hours to complete, but he enjoyed the process.

“I’m always pushing the limits,” he said.

Calandro has experimented with multiple mediums, but he said he likes stained-glass because it incorporates the sun. He enjoys working with a medium that speaks for itself.

“The medium I’m working with makes itself look better when I put it into a picture,” Calandro said. “No other art works like that.”

At the end of the evening voting closed and winners were announced.

Frameworks Gifts and Interiors donated a $50 gift card, the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources donated a wine basket, and the first prize was $100.

Calandro won first place.

“I’m really happy,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it.”

He said he isn’t sure what he will do with the money, but 10 percent will be given to the Christian Campus House, and the painting will be returned to his uncle, to whom Calandro gave it as a wedding present.