Picking up the purple paint, Regina Galvan appeared excited as she created a rainbow for a mural that will soon hang at her school. 

“I like how it is going in the office hallway,” Galvan said Tuesday, as she other students at Northeast Lauderdale Elementary School participated in the Make Something Beautiful Mississippi Mural Challenge.

Students started the mural on Monday, and hope to complete it by the end of the week. 

The idea for the mural came from the book “Make Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Community.” The book is about a girl named Mira, who decided to draw a colorful sun on the walls of an alley. While Mira was leaving the alley, a muralist saw what she had done, so he got members of the neighborhood to paint murals on the other alley walls. The point of the story is that something as small as a painting can have a big impact on a community.

The book also asked readers how they could make a change in their community through art, so creating a mural was a great way for the school to become involved, according to Jennifer Boyette, the school’s art intervention teacher.

“Everybody that attends the school here will get to do it,” Boyette said, adding that the project allows students to use their creativity and become involved in the arts.

The mural is based on a combination of student ideas, including emojis, colorful trees and the Trojan horse, as Northeast is known as the Trojans.

Students at the school, including Abby Crocker, had fun creating the mural. 

“I think it is great to express creativity in art class,” said Crocker, a fourth grader.

Kaiden Turner, who spent Tuesday working on a picture of a cloud, enjoyed seeing her classmates come together for the project. 

“The community can come together and create something so simple,” Turner said.

Galvan also enjoyed the teamwork it took to create the mural.

“Everyone in the school did it, and everyone is going to feel special,” she said.

Boyette said the mural also allows students to leave a piece of them when they leave the school.

“This will be something for years to come that they can look at and say ‘I painted that section or I painted here’,” Boyette said.