The WHHS Art Club has been around for many years and in that time they have made their mark on the campus. Throughout these years, the Art Club has proven their devotion to improving WHHS.

“The objective of the Art Club is to beautify the campus,” art teacher club advisor Kim Watling said.

To the Art Club, a part of beautifying the campus is tackling the issue of cleanliness in the bathrooms. To improve this detriment, the Art Club has decided to paint murals on bathroom stalls. Watling describes the laborious process they started shortly before school got shut down in 2020.

“We cleaned the bathroom stall doors, we sanded them down, we repainted them, we primed them,” Watling said.

However, this process is ultimately worth it for many of the Art Club members.

“We want to create a very colorful and happy environment,” Watling said.

The Art Club is excited to continue working on this project during the next few weeks.

However, this is not the only project the Art Club is currently working on.

Art Club is also partaking in the 1000 cranes project, in which they fold 1000 origami cranes and hang them on mobiles to hang all around the school.

The origin of the 1000 crane story is based on the belief in Japanese Culture that if one folds 1000 cranes, a wish of theirs would come true.

In a famous story, called “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes”, a little girl named Sadako Sasaki contracted cancer as a result of radiation exposure. She began folding 1000 cranes, hoping her wish of being healed would be granted. Sadly, she passed away after folding 644 cranes. Her classmates completed the project for her and she was buried with all 1000 cranes.

“During such a challenging year, I was trying to find a project that would have more meaning,” Watling said.

In the wake of the pandemic throughout the 2020-21 school year, Watling sought to find a project students could work on at home. She put together art kits with origami paper and instructions on how to make cranes so that when they returned to school, they could bring their cranes with them.

“When they came back for the last eight weeks [of the 2020-21 school year], I had a lot of cranes and then we continued to make them,” Watling said.

Once members of the Art Club returned back to school, they began dedicating the cranes to their friends who had COVID-19. They wrote their dedications on the cranes and hung them on mobiles made of bamboo.

“We thought that this would be a good project to dedicate to those who needed healing,” Watling said.

Currently, the Art Club is still working on the project and has made around 600 cranes and six mobiles, which are what the cranes are stringed on. However, once they reach their goal of 1000 cranes, members of the art club plan to make more. They have already begun hanging cranes in the forum, to bring “peace and healing” to all students and they plan to hang the mobiles all around the school.

When asked what the cranes mean to her, SENIOR Adia Eagle said that “the beauty and the uniqueness of the cranes” is what stood out to her.

Eagle, who is the president of the Art club, noticed how every crane greatly differs.

“It represents the uniqueness of Walnut,” Eagle said.