É«¶à¶à

She’d long grappled with low self-esteem and struggled with making friends. When she walked past people she barely knew at Waunakee High School in Wisconsin, however, she’d feel a dash of defiance about her secret project.

They had no inkling of what she could do with a paintbrush.

“It was almost kind of like evil shenanigans that were going on,� she said. “You have no idea what I’m doing. You have no clue what I’m making.�

Except Schafer had worked on the furthest thing from evil: 44 portraits she painted over the course of the school year that she gifted to her graduating classmates. An “extreme act of kindness,� said Avery Miller, one of the recipients.

Because that would show them.

And it certainly did. The recognition for Schafer’s project has echoed far beyond the Waunakee campus. In June the “CBS Evening News� broadcasted a segment about it. She’s gotten more than a hundred commission requests for her artwork.

The attention has overwhelmed her, she said, its degree so much greater than anything she imagined when she embarked on the project in fall 2024. And magnitudes greater than years ago, when she warmed to painting, the medium that would become her respite.

That was freshman year of high school. She’d focused on sketching and drawing, but she found paint, with its vibrant colors, more appealing than clutching a pencil. 

“I just really like how you can be chaotic with it, but also so neat,� she said.

Outside of art classes, though, she kept drawing. When the year drew to a close, she gave a drawing of a car to a graduating senior. He liked it, and others did too.

So began her tradition of giving drawings of cars, sometimes with personal notes on the backside, to graduating seniors. She often knew the recipients as “sort of friends� — well, she “stuck around them,� she said — and wanted to give them things that would help them remember her.

She knew people, sure, but she felt lonely, judged, quiet. Observant.

Observant, in that she noticed people whispering, gossiping. Are they talking about me? she worried. That doesn’t make sense, she tried to reason. 

She kept listening. Sometimes she would hear her classmates talking about their weekend plans.

“What is it like to be invited to something like that?� she wondered. “What is it like to have people at your beck and call that you can just invite over?�

Then came the time she fell down the bleachers.

Schafer took photos for Warrior Media, which has students stream and photograph Waunakee High sports events. While snapping some basketball shots, she fell.

She remembers all the students turning to look at her. No one asked whether she was all right.

Things like that stuck with her.

And as senior year loomed, she felt lost.

“I’ve always been someone who knew more upperclassmen than I did people in my own grade,� she said. “And then when it finally came around to being my senior year, I was very much at a loss of what to do.�

Even so, she had the ingredients for an undertaking unlike any other.

She had a massive catalog of photos she’d taken at sports games. She’d spent the past three years honing her painting finesse and in junior year had enjoyed painting her first athlete portrait, a gift for a family friend graduating.

So for her Advanced Placement art portfolio, which required an overarching theme, she put the pieces together and settled on an audacious objective: Paint scores of portraits based on the sports photos she’d taken.

If anyone else had proposed a project of such scale, Beth Crook de Valdez would’ve had her doubts. But, the art teacher knew, this was Molly Schafer.

“One thing that anybody who knows Molly well knows is when she sets her mind to something, it’s going to happen,� Crook de Valdez said. She’d taught Schafer since sophomore year.

Thus the painstaking process of pouring hundreds of hours into dozens of paintings started.

For each portrait, she’d scour the photos she’d taken of the athlete, pick some of them and make a digital cutout. She used this digital mockup to visualize potential backgrounds and fiddle with the composition.

The digital cutout gave her an idea of how to outline the subject on a canvas. She masked off the outline so she could paint the background first. Then came the athlete.

Take any one of her portraits of a football player. He might be gazing intently or striding confidently. He wears Waunakee purple, shining defiantly through the creases on his football jersey, Warrior-like.

Yet you can feel each player’s personality emanating outward, his eyes maybe peering out from under a helmet, commanding your attention in front of a backdrop with bursts or swirls of blue, red and yellow.

“When I saw her working on the first one, my jaw hit the ground,� Crook de Valdez said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, OK, this is going to be amazing.’�

Schafer selected her subjects representing a range of sports. She focused on people she attended elementary school with, many she felt she used to know.

And she chose to depict athletes because, aside from being able to use her trove of photographs as models, she wanted to memorialize the dedication high school sports requires, especially for the many athletes who might not keep playing in college and beyond.

It resonated with her. The athletes spend inordinate hours training for their sports, she thought, but unlike with painting, they wouldn’t have a chance to play beyond senior year.

She, too, spent hundreds of hours leading up to the grand reveal in May. In the classroom. In the library, where she staked out a spot to paint. And in her home workshop, an elevated nook in her garage that requires a short climb up a ladder with loosely carpeted rungs.

Around two years ago, she needed a place to paint. Her father, Cory Schafer, helped her build the place. He lost part of his “man cave,� said her mother, Ann Schafer, but she gained a place to paint for hours on end.

The Schafers heard about their daughter’s project in passing. At first, they had little idea of its eventual scale and the commitment it entailed. They had few clues.

“We are on a need-to-know basis as parents,� Ann Schafer said with a smile.

After a school year of toiling on the project — spending so much time that she was failing two of her classes — Molly Schafer readied for the reveal in mid-May. She arranged the paintings on huge boards, about a third of the canvases on each, that would be leaned on a wall to be displayed.

It happened to be senior skip day.

Word spread regardless. The underclassmen shared photos of the paintings, and the buzz began.

The plaudits started coming in.

Some of the seniors she depicted approached her to express their gratitude and amazement, she said.

“I’m surprised they even remember my name,� she recounted thinking.

She got invited to graduation parties, like the one next door where people “stuck by my side� because they knew she wasn’t very familiar with parties. And she reconnected with some of her classmates.

One of those classmates, Miller, said she felt “flabbergasted� upon learning about the painting.

She remembered how Schafer often didn’t have a partner during the world history class they had together during freshman year. So Miller would offer to partner with her on class projects. She thinks that left an impression.

“She was so kind,� Miller said. “She was always saying, ‘Avery, thank you so much. Are you sure you want to be my partner? I really appreciate it.’�

The portrait Schafer painted for Miller depicted her about to serve a volleyball, left arm outstretched. She got it framed at Michaels ahead of her graduation party, and now it hangs in her sports-dedicated basement.

The attention, however, grew far beyond Waunakee.

Soon, CBS News reached out to the school. The crew connected with Schafer, telling her that a story could happen, no guarantees. And then it did.

“They came from New York to this Wisconsin town to do a story on me, and that just blows my mind,� Schafer said. “I can’t even conceptualize that in my head.�

With a backlog of art commissions waiting, Schafer said she doesn’t need a summer job. She plans to attend Madison Area Technical College for two years and then transfer to a larger university.

She’s not sure if she’ll study art. Maybe another creative field, like cinematography, could prove more realistic, she said.

“The person that can find her talent will get a thousand percent effort from her,� Ann Schafer said. “Because if she’s invested, it’s unbelievable what she can do.�

But Molly Schafer vows never to stop painting.

Never, not when the escape it offered from her worries showed her the truth, that there’s no way everyone else chatters about her in cruel judgement, that really, she said, most people are nice.

So the gift will live on, just like the ones she gave to 44 of her classmates.