Pingry congratulates freshman Lucy Miao for being the Grand Prize Winner in the 2012 Constitution Day Poster Design Contest, an international event promoted exclusively on ConstitutionFacts.com.
The competition invites students in Kindergarten through Grade 12 to celebrate Constitution Day by designing a poster that shows how they benefit from the freedoms embodied in the U.S. Constitution. There were over 30,000 submissions this year, most of them submitted nationally, and a peer group of six high school students in Illinois selected the top five in each grade for online public voting.
“Lucy had to be chosen by the peer group and win the most votes cast online from more than 100,000 visitors to the site. The competition is always fierce, so it’s quite an achievement to win,” said Keir Walton, president of Oak Hill Publishing Company, which operates ConstitutionFacts.com.
Lucy spent about 15 hours designing and painting her poster on watercolor paper with ideas inspired by trips to Washington, D.C. with Pingry and her family last school year. There are four main sections: she painted “We the People” at the top, used a pen for the Constitution’s introductory text underneath, and then painted the bald eagle, American flag, and Statue of Liberty above the Capitol building. “Our universal American symbols express the most fundamental human right, freedom,” Lucy wrote in her application that accompanied the poster.
She painted the poster entirely in watercolors. “They’re beautiful and unpredictable. You have to guide the water where you want it to go,” she said. Her art teacher for three years, Jane Edwards, agreed. “Watercolor is a sophisticated medium. You have to allow its limitations to work for you,” she said.
Lucy started to draw at age five, began to take Saturday art classes in Edison at age six, and began to use watercolors around age seven. She has her own art supplies at home, paints for a few hours every week, and attends art camp during the summer. At Pingry, she is also involved with the Creative Writing Club, plays in the Upper School Strings, and writes for Polyglot, Pingry’s modern and classical languages magazine, and The Pingry Record, Pingry’s student newspaper.
