Clements High School senior Sabrina Harbin painted this mural in the cafeteria of the school. She started at the beginning of the school year and finished March 13. 

Students eating lunch and snacks at Clements High School now do so on the imaginative patio of the Colts Café, a eatery depicted next to a cherry tree painted on the cafeteria wall.

Typically when high school seniors graduate, they leave behind only photos in the yearbook and fond memories. One senior made a more permanent impression with the cafeteria painting.

Sabrina Harbin said she’s always felt like she’s blended in the crowd at school, but she was known for one thing.

“I’ve kind of always been the artistic person in my grade,” she said Friday.

There’s a tradition at Clements where the senior class leaves a painting behind to commemorate the graduating class. Harbin was approached to do the cafeteria mural because teachers knew of her skills and she had a teacher’s aide period each morning to work.

Harbin was presented with an idea: a “Colts Café,” complete with a wrought-iron fence. She took the concept and ran, sketching it out, transferring the drawing to a transparency and scaled the drawing to size on the wall. A student of the Limestone County Career Technical Center’s technology and drafting program, Harbin said the skills she learned in computer-aided drafting courses helped her design the piece. She also added a blooming cherry blossom tree to commemorate her home state of Oregon and as a nod to breast cancer awareness.

“It added a very kind of romantic feeling,” Harbin said of the tree.

She started not long after classes began in August. Working alone meant the painting would take a long time to complete. Working with oil paints meant working longer still. Harbin did not finish the pastoral scene of a country café until March 13 — two days before the school’s open house and ribbon-cutting ceremony. While relived to complete the project, Harbin said she’s coming to realize her high school career is almost at an end.

“I almost felt a little bit lost to be done with it,” she said Friday. “It kind of made me realize I’m almost graduated.”

Though Harbin and her class will soon leave Clements, their legacy will live on in the mural. She dedicated the painting to her class by giving the café a doormat with “Class of 2015” written in big, white letters.

“It was just great I could leave something for my class,” Harbin said.