News photo — Griffin Kelly Lake Placid High School junior Isabella Read holds up a watercolor self-portrait that highlights her Zodiac sign, Sagittarius.

LAKE PLACID – Coil pots are a form of pottery where you stack clay rings on top of each other. Isabella Read, or Izzy for short, hates making coil pots.

“When Ms. Huber told us we were doing coil pots, I was livid,” Read said. “I did the project, but I just needed to make it more interesting.”

The finished design was still a pot that could house a plant, but it ended up looking more like a four-legged creature than a decorative vessel. Its name is William, and it sits in Mrs. Duggan’s social studies classroom. The were some bumps and cracks along the way, but William is still in one piece. The plant, however, is a different story.

“I didn’t think it would work,” said Sandy Huber, Read’s art and ceramics teacher at Lake Placid High School. “I thought gravity would make it impossible, but she somehow made it work.”

Read, a junior, strays away from convention and embraces the weird and different. She likes anime. She plays the world-building video game and cultural phenomenon Minecraft. She listens to Gorillaz, a band comprised entirely of cartoon characters (It’s actually Damon Albarn from the British rock band Blur, but the cartoons are the real spectacle.)

Photo provided Izzy Read’s coil pot structure, named William, is a four-legged creature and a far cry from the traditional style of coil pots.

All these factors and interests go into how Read doesn’t go for straight recreation with her art. She takes the normal and makes it abnormal.

“I love things that don’t really make sense, like monsters and mythology and those kinds of things,” she said.

One project she’s been working on lately is watercolor portraits of her friends, but the faces are infused with elements of the Zodiac. One is of a lion’s head with a full mane and a feline mouth, but a pair of thick-rimmed glasses cover its human expression. Another shows a male blue face with the Pisces fish swimming around the nose. Her self-portrait exhibits Read’s closed-eyed, full-tooth grin surrounded in a cloud of golden locks and arrows. She’s a Sagittarius.

Another ongoing project is her characters, a group of human-animal hybrids with their own origins and backstories.

“When I was about 12 or 13 I made my very first character,” she said. “Her name was Jeffy, and I used them to basically express the parts of myself that I didn’t like and try to bring them into a better area.”

News photo — Griffin Kelly Izzy Read also does watercolor art of Zodiac signs, in this case Leo and Scorpio.

Read dabbles in many forms of art – painting, drawing, ceramics, photography, portraiture, cartoons – and she isn’t afraid to offer assistance to her classmates.

“She actually helps the other students a lot,” Huber said. “She’s kind of my unofficial assistant teacher.”

When she’s not drawing, painting or photographing, Read loves to bake.

“Like cookies and cake,” she said. “I love sweets and have a great triple chocolate bundt cake recipe.”

She also watches a lot of cartoons. Her favorite show right now is “Steven Universe,” a coming-of-age story about a little chubby boy understanding his purpose as a magical being.

Photo provided Jeffy is Izzy Read’s first original character; she drew her when she was about 13 years old.

One of her more nostalgic hobbies is that she likes to rummage through yard sales in search of old VHS cassettes.

“My best find recently was a ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ tape,” she said. “I also found another copy of ‘The Mask.’ It’s my favorite movie, so I have, like, three copies of it.”

Read recently got accepted into a pre-college program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. For five weeks, she’ll earn college credit, taking illustration and animation classes and attending field trips to Washington, D.C., and New York City. The tuition is $6,130. She received a financial aid grant of $2,730 and is taking donations on her GoFundMe page at gofundme.com/send-izzy-to-mica-precollege.

For the past two years, she has attended the New York Summer School of the Arts in Fredonia.

“The MICA one is going to be different,” Huber said. “It’s going to be difficult and have a lot of new challenges, but that’s what she thrives on.”

“This is going to be a good way for her to progress as an artist,” said Connie Hammaker, a counselor at LPHS. “She’s in AP Arts as a junior, so she’s kind of at her max with our classes. This will really give her the opportunity to explore her talent even more, and it’s great preparation for art school.”

Read’s journey into the world of art started when she was in kindergarten. She drew a multi-colored bird, and the school wound up using the picture in its calendar.

“Ever since then, I was like, ‘Oh, I must be good at this,” Read said, laughing. “I’ve been drawing since I was really young. I’ve never been good at much of anything else.”