In Room N316 on the third floor of Gordon Parks Arts Hall, students drift in and settle at tables, talking, unpacking, easing into their work for AP Drawing and Painting. Lyla Ruiz De Luzuriaga doesn’t.

“She comes in early — almost every day,” her teacher, Ana Romero, said. “She sets her things down and just starts.”

At the front table, while the room hums with chatter, Lyla leans over her piece, building a world in ink, line-by-line, until the paper is so full it demands a closer look.

Lately, the worlds she builds have begun to circle around a single personal idea of time.

“Recently I’ve been very aware of time and the time that we have,” Lyla said. After a pause, she added, “I think maybe it has something to do with my grandpa, who’s going through dementia right now. I’m kind of hyper-aware of the time that I have with him specifically, but then also the time I have with other people in my life.”

That awareness has shifted not only how she thinks about art, but about life.

That awareness is also at the center of her Scholastic Award-winning, two-part illustration, “Cycle of Time.” The Lost Future earned a gold award, and The Fallen Past, earned silver. The Lost Future received an American Visions nomination.

But the project didn’t start out with the same ambition that it ended with. Instead, it began with uncertainty.

“I was actually in an artist block stage of my journey, where I couldn’t think of any ideas and so I asked my teacher, Ms. Romero, in AP Art and Drawing for a prompt, and it had something to do with past and future,” Lyla said.

This starting point soon became reshaped into a diptych, two mirrored scenes in which squirrels as the characters move through a fallen futuristic city and its imagined past.

For Ms. Romero, what stands out is not just the concept but how Lyla brings it to life, building worlds that hold the viewer’s attention.

“They’re really busy,” she said, “but busy in a way that really garners your attention and makes you want to keep exploring,”

Lyla’s process mirrors that effect. She begins with a loose sketch, then commits to ink, a medium that doesn’t forgive second guesses.

“ I’m so drawn to ink illustration because I don’t have that hesitation with pencil where I am like, oh, I can just erase something,” Lyla said. “It’s permanent.”

Instead of correcting mistakes, she builds around them, adding details until the piece emanates a sense of fulfillment. The hardest part of the process is deciding when a piece is finished.

“ I feel like deciding when it was done was really hard, because I wasn’t really sure if there was something else I wanted to add, or if at some point it was just gonna get too cluttered,” she said. “I think that’s pretty universal for a lot of my pieces, where it’s just a matter of, like, when do I feel like it’s ready?”

Now, at the front table in room N316, Lyla leans over a new set of canvases, this time for her AP portfolio. A streetlight curves into something else, a car ride that turns into a dream.

She leans in, adds a line, and another, building the moment before it disappears.

This story was originally published on U-High Midway on April 20, 2026.