Tupelo High School art students are painting a mural to fill a blank canvas once occupied by lockers.

“It’s a great way to show school spirit,” said Jason Harris, THS principal. “Our long-term goal is to get all the lockers out of A Building.”

Harris said the issue is students don’t use the lockers anymore.

“They need to go,” freshman Eleanor Perkins said. “It’d free up so much space in the hallways, and it’d stop all the questions that we have about them.”

The mural, which is 4 feet tall and 8 feet wide, will be hung on the cinderblock wall where the lockers used to be. The space, which is about 24-by-6 feet, offered a challenge for the students, art teacher Anna Garner said.  

“The plan was to paint directly on that wall, but the wall was too sharp,” Garner said, explaining the surface is not smooth so the mural must be painted on a piece of hardboard.

Garner said the students were also challenged by the size of the mural.

“This is a mural painting that is a lot different for students from painting small scale,” Garner said. “It’s a lot more difficult to paint on such a large-scale project, so they have to learn a whole new set of skills.”

Six Painting II students, one junior and five seniors, are working on the mural. They are Wyatt Herring, Cara Lowry, Zack McIntosh, Sophie Petruskevich, Keondra Thomas and Rachel Williams.

Garner said the small class is ideal for a project this size.

“That’s perfect for a mural because 20 people can’t work on it at the same time anyway,” she said. “Three work on it one day, three work on it the next day, because it’s tough to get crowded around it.”

Petruskevich said she likes working on the mural.

“It’s fun,” she said. “I like coming out here and painting it. It’s going to be cool when it’s put up in A Building and I will know I did that.”

Petruskevich and her classmates are painting the mural from photographs.

“Mr. Harris wanted blue and gold in order to show school spirit,” she said. “We have football players, cheerleaders, band members and Tupelo Boys.”

The Golden Wave baseball team is also featured.

McIntosh said painting the mural was a great learning experience.

“I feel that we all did pretty good on it, putting all our artistic skills together,” he said.  

Harris said he is pleased with the mural.

“I checked on it and it’s quite stunning,” he said. “I really like it. It’s very colorful. I think it’s going to look good there.”

Harris said the goal is to hang the mural over the holidays.

“I think it will be cool,” senior Josh Randle said. “These walls are kind of plain.”

Harris said the wall will also be used for student recognition such as high ACT scores.

William Barr II, Jack Burt, Gwynnette McGaughy, Bo Mercier, Hannah Newsom and Courtney Pugh contributed to this story.