ATLANTA — A New Hampshire artist who graduated from a Vassalboro high school and later sculpted the University of Maine’s fighting Black Bear mascot will leave her indelible mark on the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games.

The U.S. Mint has announced that Patricia Lewis Verani, of Londonderry, N.H., was one of two New England artists whose designs for Olympic commemorative coins were chosen in its limited numismatic competition. The other was James C. Sharpe of Westport, Conn.

Verani’s design of a $5 gold coin featuring an Olympic flag bearer was unveiled during ceremonies hosted by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games and attended by U.S. Treasurer Mary Ellen Withrow and members of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Verani will receive a commission of about $3,500 for her design that will be on 300,000 such coins to be released beginning in January 1996 as part of a two-year, 16-coin set, the mint’s largest ever.

The 67-year-old mother of four and 1944 graduate of Oak Grove School in Vassalboro flew to Atlanta Wednesday with her husband, Osvaldo, to see her initials on the design of the front of the coin that will have an Atlanta Olympics logo on its back.

Proceeds from the sale of 1995 and ’96 Olympic coins — that join Olympic history to modern sport — will help train and sponsor the U.S. Olympic team that has received $65 million from coin sales since 1984.

Asked her reaction to the announcement, Verani said she felt, “amazement … I think you just have to attribute it to luck and being in the right place at the right time,” she said.

But her skill as a sculptor transcends her modesty.

Verani designed an official medal for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society commemorating the 1991 bicentennial of the Bill of Rights and the front of a 50-cent piece for the bicentennial of the U.S. Congress in 1989.

She created the front for the U.S. Olympic silver dollar in 1988, and in 1987 sculpted a silver dollar for the bicentennial of the Constitution, which won “Most Popular Coin of the Year” recognition from Krause Publications.

Verani won first prize in the competition to design the “Fighting Black Bear,” the mascot of the University of Maine. Her eight-foot bronze — a fixture on the UM campus in Orono — was finished in 1979.

Her work can be found in private collections and in the numismatic collections of the British Museum and Smithsonian Institute.

“I like the tactile quality of sculpture. When you go into most museums, they say not to touch the artwork,” Verani said. “These things you want to touch … a blind person wouldn’t get anything out of a painting, necessarily.”

Verani designs coins and medals.

“A coin takes a lot more time and effort than a medal, probably one to three months,” said Verani, who explained that the mint’s final cuts are done on a scale of thousandths of an inch.

The painstaking process begins with a flat, plaster disk, on which Verani builds up a design with hard clay and takes a number of plaster molds. A cast is taken from a mold and then an epoxy model will be used to strike the coin at the Mint in West Point, N.Y.

Verani, who has lived most of her life in New Hampshire, attended the Boston Museum School of Fine Art on a scholarship, but didn’t find much time for her art before she retired about 20 years ago.

Until then, she was busy raising her four children and working with Osvaldo in their Manchester restaurant, which they sold, and a real estate business in Londonderry, which continues today.

Verani said she spends five to six hours a day with her craft, working in her sunlit studio in the back of her home, which is adorned with her portraiture, ceramics and representational sculpture of animals, her favorite subjects.