Airshow & Fly-In Poster Unveiled

Four  students are flying high after winning the annual Watsonville Fly-In & Airshow poster contest Wednesday morning.

Senior Melissa Ramirez won the first-place prize; her design will be the official poster for the 48th annual airshow Labor Day Weekend at the Watsonville Airport.

Stephen Phillips, also a senior, earned top kudos. He used Adobe Illustrator to create the plane that students used on their posters.

"You did a really good job on the plane," third-place winner Shane Brosio told Stephen.

The winning poster depicted a red and white prop plane gliding high above checkered fields, not unlike the views pilots get over the Pajaro Valley. Its artist, Melissa, said she'd never been up in a small plane. To come up with the design, she searched for aerial images of Watsonville.

"I'm just still kind of in shock," Melissa said after the announcement that she won the poster contest.

Melissa said she scraped her original design on the final day of the contest and started over. She finished the poster in a single class period.

The students, all part of the Regional Occupation Program computer graphics classes at Aptos High School, had about two weeks to work on the poster project.

"The results were outstanding," Alice Talnack, chair of the Monterey Bay Chapter of The Ninety-Nines, Inc, an international organization of women pilots, told the students Wednesday morning with the winning posters were unveiled.

The Airshow & Fly-In board of directors selected the winning posters Friday evening.

Melissa and Stephen both got first place awards, though it will be Melissa's design on the Airshow posters. Junior Lexi Estrada was second and Shane took third.

"Those posters go all over the place," Theo Wierdsma, Executive Director Watsonville Fly-In & Air Show, told the students. "They'll be hanging everywhere."