The second-graders at Bel Pre Elementary School are making their mark on the school -- and a colorful one, at that.

With the help of visiting artist Tracy Keating, the students are painting, sculpting and gluing a multi-media mural that will become a permanent fixture on the school's walls.

In the final days of the six-week project, students clad in paint-splattered men's shirts bent over clay figurines they had molded themselves and would soon affix to the four-by-eight foot plywood mural.

Their faces fixed in concentration, they dipped their brushes into blobs of acrylic paint and proceeded to complete some of the most colorful -- and creatively shaped -- dolphins, suns and pumpkins around.

For Jeanne Urciolo, who with Peter Plant is one of Bel Pre's two full-time art teachers, the students' enthusiasm for the project is as uplifting as the brilliantly colored rainbow already affixed to the board.

"To see them lost in the creation, the connection to color, to line -- that's better than a symphony to me," she said.

Her students put it differently.

"I like art class because I like to get messy," 7-year-old Tonisha Hall said.

The project is the synthesis of creativity and good timing. Looking to further the school's commitment to the arts, administrators began researching the state's artist-in-residence program, which grants stipends for schools to bring in an artist. Soon after, the school received a donation from a parent who specified that the money be used for the arts program, Principal Carmen van Zutphen said.

Keating, a local artist and former Bel Pre parent who had already contributed several of her pieces to the school, had been working there as an instructional assistant for three years. When van Zutphen offered her the artist-in-residence position, she was thrilled.

"If you walk around the school and look at the walls, they have hands-on everything," she said, referring to the student work that bedecks nearly every wall in the building.

"[Art] is therapeutic -- not only for them, but for me to watch them work," Keating said.

School officials wanted the project to be a student creation that would add lasting beauty. Keating, a muralist herself, suggested the mural.

"We thought is would be great for the second-graders to leave a parting gift," van Zutphen said.

Keating and her students pored over art books together for ideas. Rather than choose a theme or a title, which might restricted the students' creativity, they chose to incorporate work from all 181 second-graders.

The project is designed to instill a love of art in children, Keating said.

"Some were saying they wanted to be artists when they grew up," she said. "Here, they get the idea that they can be artists now."

The project teaches artistic techniques and the process of creativity, Keating said. For one aspect of the mural, students first sketched their ideas on square pieces of paper. Each student then drew a design in marker on a wooden block, outlined the shape in glue and dipped it in sand to provide texture. The blocks were painted and arranged to form a brightly colored rainbow that spans the width of the board.

For their clay figurines, students chose subjects as varied as themselves.

"My pumpkin is to celebrate Halloween," Hall said, brushing orange paint on a grinning jack-o-lantern.

"I like animals, and my house is near the woods," explained Cassie Flores, 7, as she decorated a fox.

In the final phase of the project, the sculptures will be glued to the work. Keating will paint a background scene and seal the mural with a polyacrylic coating.

A more serious challenge during the mural's creation was the school's Code Blue policy during the sniper attacks. While frustrated and nervous students more easily verbalized their feelings in other classes, the opportunity to paint and relax in art class was calming, the teachers agreed.

"Sometimes kids react to [stress] in more subtle ways," Plant said.

Slated to be installed on the school walls this week, the mural has been a creative journey for the young artists and the teachers whose passion for art has guided the children's work.

"Your heart will go somewhere else that it has not been, in art," Urciolo said.