By SHELBA NIVENS / Community Columnist

Fifteen-year-old Cheyenne Reynolds didn’t know she liked art until third-grade art class.

Then she fell in love with it.

“She’s always painting,” her grandmother Judy Bailey said. “Every time she comes over to my house, she brings a canvas and paints.”

“My grandmother helps me with it,” Cheyenne told me. “She paints, too.”

She usually sketches a picture on canvas before she paints it, the Chelsea 10th grader said.

This is what she did with the Jimmy Durante painting her mother Sherry is entering in the Shelby County Fair for her.

A talented group of ladies — grandmother, mother and daughter — they usually enter something in several categories, from foods to photos, arts and craft.

Cheyenne said she was listening to music on her iPad when she decided to sketch the portrait of Jimmy Durante. She saw the picture on an album cover and liked it, so she sketched it, and then painted it.

She especially likes to paint people, she said, but she enjoys painting all sorts of things. She’ll just see something she likes and paint it. But, she added, she’s not good at free-hand, so she sketches it first.

Cheyenne took art classes at Chelsea schools until seventh grade, then did not begin taking them again until she entered 10th grade at the high school. She said the classes in school are all the art classes she’s had, and she does not belong to an art club. But her family, friends and teachers encourage her “all the time” to keep on doing her art.

The naurally-gifted, young artist said she would like to go on to art school after high school and have a career in some type of art.