The National Art Honor Society (NAHS) and visual arts students recently completed a clay mosaic of the Watkins Mill High School seal, displayed outside the Wellness Center at the entrance of the school.

The project, modeled after the school crest, was designed by the students of the NAHS at Watkins Mill under the supervision of visual arts teacher Limor Drexel.

“The design process was very collaborative,” Tanya Yahouedeou, former NAHS member and Watkins Mill alumna, said.  “We each pitched in designs for how to revamp the school crest and used some ideas from each design.”

This process began in December of 2019 with students creating mosaic sketches and outlines, taking three years to complete due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting progress in the 2020-21 school year.

The old school seal was created before Watkins Mill gained its International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma and Career programs.  Therefore, the art students felt that they wanted to design a new seal that more accurately reflected the curriculum and resources offered.

“We wanted to revamp the school crest since it [has] been quite a long time since it was created and we had turned into an IB school within that time,” Yahouedeou said.

The purpose of this project was to give a beautifying gift to the school and uplift school spirit within the student body.

Many students who began the initial work on the mosaic have graduated in the past few years.  Only a few students worked on it during this year, including juniors Alexis Bulong, Leslie Lizaola, and Juliana Talag, but their hard work paid off.