"On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else."
- Marshall McLuhan
Melissa Smith, of Chattanooga, holds her winning design for People Towels, a reusable cotton hand towel company.Congratulations to Chattanooga native Melissa Smith, who recently won the Judge's Award in a paper towel designing contest sponsored by People Towels, a company that makes reusable cotton hand towels.
Smith, 23, a graduate of Tyner Academy and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is presently a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at the University of Texas at Tyler.
Smith says that, regardless of the award, she doesn't consider herself an artist.
"It's just something that I play around with from time to time," she says. "I like designing things in Photoshop and I saw this contest on Facebook, so I thought I would give it a try."
The art contest was a joint competition between People Towels and the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program.
"They partnered with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and their Seafood Watch campaign to raise awareness of sustainable fishing," Smith says. "For my design (called "Tidal Change") I decided to go with something simple and I like turtles.
"I took art in high school, but that's really the extent of my training, other than that I've just done things on my own. It is a hobby."
Smith's design can be seen at peopletowels.com.
She also works in the computer lab on her Texas campus, where she tutors students with computer technical problems.
"Winning the contest hasn't really encouraged me to pursue art, but I will probably never stop making things in my spare time -- it's just something that I love doing," she says.