VENTURA : Mural Painting Gives Learning a New Tone

There are lessons to be learned, even if it is the last week of school and you are a fourth-grader helping to paint colorful murals on classroom walls.

“I learned you have to dry your brushes before you dip them in another color and you have to be careful not to mix colors,” said 10-year-old Kristin Carter, one of 200 fourth- and fifth-grade students at Saticoy School who helped paint two large murals at the Ventura campus this week.

Chimed in Lisa Hammen, 10: “And you have to stay inside the lines! And there’s no time for arguing!”

Not a moment to spare, said M.B. Hanrahan, a Ventura artist who designed the murals and oversaw the painting process at the elementary school.

Students began adding colorful acrylic paint to the designs she had sketched on two walls Monday, leaving them only three days to complete the project before school lets out for summer today.

“It’s been kind of wild,” Hanrahan said as she painted a gray outline around fanciful flowers, raindrops and trees, not stopping for even a few minutes to talk to a visitor. “But it’s been a really neat experience because these kids are bright and they learn fast.”

The murals, one measuring 12 1/2 feet high by 30 feet long and the other 8 feet high and 30 feet long, were designed with a theme of “The Sky Above, The Earth Below.”

Hanrahan used drawings submitted by about 400 Saticoy students to come up with the collages of natural and man-made elements, including a rainbow, snow-capped mountains, a dolphin, sea life, stylized flowers and a schoolyard.

The murals are painted on the side of two classrooms that face the school’s parking lot. Michele Girton, who helped with the painting, said the murals look better than the bare white walls.

“If anybody puts graffiti on them, I’ll be so mad!” the fourth-grader said.

Working in teams of 16, fourth- and fifth-graders used recesses and even some class time to help Hanrahan and her assistant, Ventura artist Michele Chapin.

“A lot of these kids don’t get a lot of art in school,” Chapin said as she added dark purple rings to a lilac-colored snail. “This gives them a chance to work side by side with professional artists.”

A third mural drawn by students in the fifth grade has been painted on the wall of a kindergarten classroom.

That mural, which depicts two teddy bears holding balloons, a toy train set and a penguin, was done entirely by fifth-graders, school officials said. The fifth-graders decided the mural would be a good send-off present to the school as they leave to enter the world of middle school, Saticoy Principal Nancy Bradford said.