The drab wall across the street from Mineola High School was supposed to be used for handball, but since the school district turned the tennis and handball courts there into much needed parking it had become nothing more than a magnet for graffiti.
Then seniors Dylan Dombrowski, Deanna Constantino and Erin Etherton stepped in to create a new point of pride for their schoolmates.
As a joint senior project the three created a mural with large rearing black-and-white horses and the motto “Mustang Pride” in prominent red-and-black letters, mounted high on the white-washed wall.
“It wasn’t doing anything,” Constantino said of the wall. “We did it to show our school spirit.”
“It was a big gray wall and it was ugly,” Dombrowski added.
And with a traffic island constructed in the middle of the lot, even when the cars weren’t there, it didn’t provide much of an opportunity to play handball.
The project has been under way since September, when the trio first struck on the idea and considering different designs. They didn’t want to mimic a mural the Mineola Boosters Club had painted on a wall at the Hampton Street School depicting three mustangs.
They did solicit suggestions from the boosters, who contributed paint for the project. But they wanted the high school mural to be strictly a student project.
“We wanted to do something school spirited. But we wanted to do something different than Hampton,” Etherton said.
Beyond the artistic creativity involved, there was the basic work of preparing the wall for the images and the motto. One coat of primer and two coats of white paint later, the trio began its work on the design of the mustang and the lettering.
The three developed an image of the mustang on a computer, then turned the image into a transparency they could project on the white wall at night. Adjusting the distance of the projection in relation to the wall enabled them to gauge the size of the image they planned to paint. They then drew the outline of the mustang from the transparency projection, and did the same with the letters.
The primary consideration with the letters was that they would be high enough to be seen over the cars in the parking lot.
Last Friday, they put the finishing touches on the project, which was approved by history teacher Paul Pereira.
All three seniors concede that the project was easier than writing the research papers that are traditionally the stuff of senior projects.
More important,, they said, is that the mural creates a legacy of sorts for them that transcends whatever senior papers they might have written.
“We wanted to give something back. And it’ll always be here,” Constantino said.
