AURORA | Scy Caroselli’s path to becoming the most popular artist on Havana Street this year started with a bet.

“My mom and I were having this fun little banter one day and she said, ‘If you can (sculpt) a child and five of them sell in the first year, I’ll pay the expense to cast them,’” she said.

Now, a slew of sales and people’s choice awards later, Caroselli’s mother, Marianne — a highly successful artist in her own right — is a few shekels poorer than she was this time last year. But it was a small price to pay for the joyful pride she gained watching her daughter succeed.

“Yeah, Mom had to pay,” Caroselli said with a chuckle. “But she’s thrilled, of course, that I’m following in her footsteps.”

On Aug. 23, the younger Caroselli was named the People’s Choice winner for this year’s Art 2C On Havana contest, an honor that came with a $1,000 prize.

“I was crazy excited,” Caroselli said. “I called my mom first thing off the bat.”

The annual contest, which is organized by the Havana Business Improvement District, asks business owners and residents to vote for their favorite sculpture among the 13 scattered in front of various retailers on Havana Street.

Caroselli’s winning sculpture, titled “Precious Cargo,” depicts a young girl carrying a wheelbarrow full of puppies. Caroselli, who moved to Colorado from Texas in 1997, said creating the cast of a child is much more difficult than sculpting the form of an adult — a challenge that spurred her mother’s artistic dare.

“Children are hard to sculpt because they’re like a whole different being — all chubby and with a different bone structure,” she said. “They’re like little aliens.”

A longtime agent for fine artists across the country, Caroselli only recently began to tap into her own creative side. And much like the impetus for “Precious Cargo,” Caroselli’s foray into a career of sculpting bronze started with some maternal goading.

“I was always in that industry, but I was never the artist,” she said. “And then it just kind of happened. I was in Texas visiting my mom, and I did a sculpture of a Clydesdale horse. I finished it in like three hours and when my mom saw it she just started crying.”

Now, following a stint at an art school in Pietrasanta, Italy, Caroselli’s work is displayed in eight galleries across the country. She and her mother also use a slew of foundries across the metro area to turn their casts into lasting bronze sculptures.

Nearly all of Caroselli’s collections are comprised of 44 individual pieces — a number that the artist thoughtfully chose.

“It’s a bit of a special number to me,” she said. “I didn’t want to do 80, and eight is to little, so I did four and four, which in my head I knew was eight. And my mom’s favorite number is four, so it all came together.”

She added her days as an art agent galvanized her belief that every collection should be limited in scope.

“Once an edition is sold out, that’s it — we destroy the mold so no more can be made,” she said. “I think it’s very, very important to stick to that. When it’s sold out, it’s sold out. It’s important to keep that edition exactly what that number is.”

Caroselli will likely be the last democratically-selected People’s Choice winner, as the contest has simply not elicited enough responses in recent years to make it fair or viable going forward, according to Gayle Jetchick, executive director of the Havana BID.

“We just have not had a very good turnout,” Jetchick said. “We gave (the public) from the middle of last October to now to go out and vote, and I would be surprised if we got 100-150 votes total.”

Jetchick said that next year the selection process will be run by the city’s Art in Public Places Commission, which also helps decide which pieces will be placed in front of Havana Businesses each year. The public art commissioners will divvy up the $1,000 grand prize between the first-, second- and third-place winners.

Caroselli will be honored at the annual Art 2C gala in October. A new batch of sculptures will be placed along Havana later that month.