For 10-year-old Caitlin Geiger, art camp is more than just a chance to get out of the house.

The Quinlan Visual Arts Center’s annual summer camp has a more personal tie.

My dad was an artist before he died of cancer at age 51,” said Geiger, a rising sixth-grader at Gainesville Middle School.

Her father did abstract art, while Geiger considers herself more of a realist, evidenced by the detailed Dr. Pepper can she drew as part of Monday’s soda can sampler, themed after artist Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup prints.

“We’re doing pop art,” she said. “We’re copying soda cans onto paper and then we’re using carbon paper to trace it so we can make this one the actual color of the can and make these different colors.”

Pop art, the theme of this year’s camp, inspires students using the works of Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Haring, art camp director Fox Gradin said.

“Pop is short for popular culture. We’re taking things from popular culture and making art from it,” said Gradin, who also teaches the oldest campers.

Each group of campers does age-appropriate projects. Gradin’s students will spend the rest of the week doing art such as life-size shoe sculptures and superhero-themed projects.

Art camp, which Gradin estimated began about 30 years ago, has a different theme each summer.

“We try to think about how we can coincide with the art upstairs (in the gallery),” she said. “We knew Mark Boomershine was coming and this was the type of thing he did.”

Gradin said Boomershine’s pop art work, titled “Super Heroes Have Thoughts and Feelings Too,” was the inspiration for the camp’s superhero project.

Monday was the start of the fourth camp session. Each session lasts a week and hosts budding artists from first grade and up.

“Me and my brother both like to build sculptures at home. We sell them sometimes,” said Destiny Farmer, 10, a rising fifth-grader at Mount Vernon Elementary School. “I like art camp because we get to be creative in our own ways.”