An Inside Look at Artistic Creativity : Education: Students learn to build an inflatable sculpture, then decorate the interior with drawings related to their studies.

Pillows are for sleeping, except when they’re eight feet tall and take up half a school cafeteria.

Then they are inflatable sculptures known as “art boxes,” and no one involved in building them gets a moment’s rest.

In a frantic six hours Monday and Tuesday, students at Valley View Elementary School in Santa Clarita taped sheets of clear plastic together to form an air-filled chamber spacious enough to hold 35 junior Picassos at a time. Electric fans sucked in air to keep the sculpture inflated while one class after another crawled inside and used colorful markers to cover it with hundreds of drawings.

“A blitzkrieg art assignment,” Michael Marks, Santa Clarita’s cultural arts coordinator, called it. “But they never do a bad job.”

The project is part of the city’s innovative arts outreach program, which also includes a side-splitting lesson by Marks for schoolchildren on how to make enormous soap bubbles. The art boxes cost schools about $100 apiece in materials, and the city pays Marks about $33,000 annually to build the sculptures and plan arts events in the community.

“It adds a real spark to the school,” said Tom Garvey, principal of Valley View Elementary. “Kids really need to express their creativity and to produce something, and this gives them a chance to do that while working cooperatively.”

Marks, 39, a blond-haired, blue-eyed artist who strongly resembles actor Gene Wilder, learned how to construct the art boxes as an undergraduate at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He went on to build more elaborate air-filled sculptures, such as a 325-foot-long snake and 72-foot-wide octopus, as an artist-in-residence in Castaic under a state program.

A vegetarian who raises his own food and is known for wearing such unorthodox outfits as a blue polka-dotted shirt and a hot pink zebra-striped tie, Marks “is a child himself whose playfulness helps him relate extremely well to children,” said Karen Stein, a fifth-grade teacher at Valley View who has known Marks since he was a graduate student 10 years ago at CalArts.

“It’s kind of like an assembly line, but more fun,” Marks explained to students before they began to tape the 24-foot-long by 24-foot-wide plastic box together and then cut out four holes for entryways and fan ducts. “We can’t do this project unless we work as a team.”

After the box was assembled, a group of youngsters decorated what would be the ceiling by tracing outlines of their bodies on the plastic, then filling them in with colored markers to resemble characters such as basketball player Michael Jordan, aliens from outer space and clowns.

The next day, the children gasped in wonder as each class entered the translucent box for a mere 10 minutes to decorate it with turtles, tepees, machines and other themes chosen by their teachers to correspond with their lessons.

“Could you come to someone’s house and build one?” Johnni Bass, 11, implored Marks. “My mother wants to see it.”

No, he can’t, Marks said. But the art box will be on display in the school cafeteria for parents April 2.