Saturday's 34th annual ArtsFest on Georgia Southern University's Sweetheart Circle - hosted for the first time by the Statesboro-Bulloch County Parks and Recreation Department, with a lot of help from friends - continued many traditional attractions but also included some new twists. Art stops offered painting with brushes and fingers, clay and sand art activities and digital art for mobile devices.

There was also ARTchery fun with bows and arrows and a steam roller for making "large-scale" prints. Local talent performed on the community stage, including several musical groups, a dance academy, an improvisation group, a taekwondo school and Statesboro High School theater students.

After GSU's Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art announced at the beginning of the year it would no longer host the event, the recreation department put this year's effort together in less than three months, with the help of the university and many of its departments, the Averitt Center for the Arts, Bulloch County Schools, Charter Conservatory, the Statesboro Regional Art Association and the Statesboro Regional Library.