Tara Chklovski says-

I am an aerospace engineer and a muralist and often work with LA Works designing, sketching and painting murals for urban schools in Los Angeles.
Last year I was offered the chance to design a large mural for an amphitheater in an elementary school in Orange Country (Wilson Elementary).

The mural was to cover 4 large (building-sized) walls and the principal wanted it to be animal-themed. I like to design murals that teach the students some things about the world they live in. So I designed 4 ecosystems - rain-forest, ocean, desert and tundra. It took me 5 whole days to just do the concept sketches and color them in. After they were approved by the school board, I spent 15 days sketching them onto the walls. I live in Marina del Rey and had to commute every morning to Orange county. To beat the traffic I would leave home by 5. I would start sketching by 6 in the morning and leave by 1 in the afternoon when it got too hot.
Every day when I would get there in the morning, there would be a few students hanging around the mural. They would run up and greet me and ask me what I would paint that day. Slowly more and more children would gather around me and watch me sketch, hold my ladder, give my paint brush when it fell, offer advice and make requests for animals to be put into the mural. The rain forest mural was the most popular and I got so many requests for animals to be in put into that one, that it very quickly became into a rain-forest-african savannah-chinese jungle mural. I got to know so many children and each one would ask me why I was spending so much time doing this and when I would say that it was because I wanted to do something beautiful for them, they would be so awestruck and touched!
It was so gratifying! Especially because the children noticed every little detail, every little dot and dash that I put in or changed. It took me more than 100 hours to sketch the entire mural, but the children's whole-hearted appreciation was more than enough to get me out of bed at 5 in the morning and drive 50 miles.
The final painting was done by 100 volunteers from Deloitte and Touche. A video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2484922738618512260&q=sausd

More pictures of the murals can be seen at
http://mowglimurals.com/pages/Big%20Views1_jpg.htm

This experience turned out to be much harder than I had expected, but seeing the children's appreciation for things of beauty made me realize how worthwhile the effort is. I have been painting murals on a regular basis ever since!