Jefferson students are contributing their art skills to the Jefferson community and are painting a four panel mural in the back of the lecture hall starting this winter break. The idea of the mural was formed last year in Dec. 2019 by the SGA and the painters are aiming to have fully painted the mural by March of 2021.

Senior Forest Meng and senior Tammy Ding made the designs for the mural. The artists and eight other painters will be working on the project. Each of the four panels is in different settings and all have some symbol representing Jefferson in them. The four themes of the panels are robotics, astronomy, the jungle, and scientific research.

“I think our school lacks art that’s up on the walls so it looks kind of undecorated. So I think that it would be nice to have some large scale art,” Ding said when asked why she wanted to paint the mural.

The painting process itself will take a lot of time and require a lot of dedication from the painters. Since the start of the project, the SGA has been saying that this will be a big time commitment for anyone planning to participate and that painters should be ready to really commit to the project. Junior Yeefay Li is also helping with organizing the project and making sure that everything stays on track.

“We will be meeting once a week every week until March,” Li said when asked about the work schedule.

The painters themselves will be separated into different groups to work on different panels.

“We’re going to assign people to specific murals so we’d have 2-3 per panel. We are doing this because we want consistency and to have the same style throughout the canvas,” Meng said.

Originally, the project was supposed to be started a year ago, but because of Covid, it had been pushed back. The muralists are still facing problems when it comes to planning the project during Covid and trying to stay safe.

“Obviously to paint and sketch we will all have to go to a single place and you have to wear masks and social distance and there might still be the chance of you getting corona,” Li said.

“Some of the painters are worried about painting in close quarters and since we will be painting for two hour each block, the masks might be kinda annoying,” Ding said.

Another problem that might affect the painters because of Covid is having a lack of motivation when actually painting the mural.

“Mainly the problem is just how to motivate yourself and since this is a large project and we don’t have a lot of people it will require a lot of dedication,” Meng said.

The painters are working on a firm deadline and have to get the project done by March when it will be unveiled.

“We have a hard deadline on this one,” Li said.