Nine art and design students and a professor recently completed murals that will be used in a national conference.

The National Society of Safety Engineers will feature the two paintings at its conference in Baltimore from June 14 to 16.

John Weinkein, professor of art and design, acted as the coordinator for the group project.

He also designed the concepts for the murals, which incorporated the conference’s historical location.

“We’re basically dealing with using the setting of Baltimore as a backdrop, and the first one depicts a historic or past view, and the second depicts the future of safety engineering,” he said.

Weinkein said the conference and the murals are built around the theme “Leading the Profession into a Star-Spangled Future,” since Baltimore is where Frances Scott Key penned the national anthem.

“We were trying to visualize that phrase. So we tried to use this very brilliant night sky with stars and a sense of fireworks going off, reminiscent of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ lyrics,” he said, noting that the group also used images relating to safety engineers.

Weinkein said the group, which was made up of mostly art and design majors, had the same kind of core team that worked on another project, but with a few new students helping out.

One student who enjoyed working on the second mural is Amanda Padilla, senior in fine arts.

She said she ran into Weinkein while on campus, and he encouraged her to help out the team.

Padilla estimated that it took the team about one week to finish the second mural.

During that time, she worked on generalized detail and background.

Since different people put in varying amounts of time into working on the murals, it was very much a collaborative effort, Padilla said.

Weinkein’s participation as coordinator gave focus to the team, she said.

“He was really easy going. It was really fun working with him,” she said.

“It kind of brought him to a professional world, as opposed to a classroom. It was good hands-on experience,” Padilla said.

Vanessa Ehert, senior in fine arts, spent nine-and-a-half hours on Thursday and Friday lettering the murals.

Ehert agreed that Weinkein’s leadership was much appreciated.

“He explained what he wanted good enough, and he didn’t get in the way,” she said.

“He was really supportive of us,” Ehert said.

Weinkein said the effort of the group was a great professional stepping stone for his students.

“It’s an incredibly educational opportunity for them,” he said. “They get to work as a team, and they get to work on a painting on a very monumental scale.”

Padilla agreed that creating the murals was a learning experience.

“I thought it gave me a good opportunity to see [art] in the professional world; it’s different than contact with art through my classes,” she said.

Weinkein said although the murals were a success, if he had to change the experience he would have let the students help more with inventing the images used.

“One of the problems is the short turnaround time, but if we get the opportunity to do this again, we’ll try to get the students more involved with the design aspect of it,” he said.