MECHANIC FALLS — Fill a tree with electric pink leaves. Create a perch for a bigger-than-life blue and yellow macaw. Paint a too-green pasture beneath a blue sky where scarlet and purple dragons duel.

For Whitney and Hallie Frost, ages 14 and 11, painting the walls of the children’s section of the new Mechanic Falls Public Library meant following their instincts.

“I let their artistic abilities lead the way,” said the girls’ mom, Linda Frost. “And I just kind of followed along.”

The result, painted over five weeks in October and November, is an eye-popping mishmash.

“It would have been very dull if I did it,” the elder Frost said, sitting in the library beneath trees with striped trunks. “The tree trunks would have been brown and the leaves would be green.”

But this project was never meant to be ordinary.

It started with the closure of the longtime library on Pleasant Street, a small, hard-to-access brick building with no elevator. The town sold the building to a local couple, Rick and Cathy Dionne, who plan to make it into a cafe, Town Manager John Hawley said.

And the library was relocated to the second floor of the town hall, in a space formerly occupied by adult education classes. It was a simple, serviceable space. And it was drab with adult plainness.

A library leader called Elm Street School, looking for an artistic student. An art teacher gave them two: Hallie, a sixth-grader, and Whitney, now a ninth-grader at Poland Regional High School. 

The girls jumped at the chance to decorate the area, but there was so much wall space to fill, covering an outer area’s broad arch and a smaller, inner room with its smaller arch.

Whitney began with the broad strokes. The inner room would be a castle with turrets and a stone-looking exterior and an interior with family portraits and a grandfather clock. Outside the castle, one large, unbroken wall would be a field with a menagerie of animals. The larger arch would be decorated with an arbor, complete with more animals, flowers and birds.

The color scheme was a given.

“This is for kids and they have to have the right color,” Whitney said. “I didn’t want some plain old green trees.”

Some of the unconventional choices were planned. Others popped up as they looked at how it came together.

“It started out on paper,” Whitney said. Then, they rolled paint onto the walls for the background. Most details, including the architecture and critters, were penciled in place. Slowly, they filled the lines with paint.

The work took nights and weekends over a five-week period. Hallie specialized in some of the critters, from the pensive pussycat in the center of the field to the birds and the ‘possum hanging from a tree limb. Her favorite was the blue and yellow macaw.

“It kind of looks real,” Hallie said.

For Whitney, it was a butterfly.

Both said they are proud of the work and will particularly enjoy it when children begin using the space. The library is tentatively slated to open at the end of January.

“I think they did an awesome job,” Hawley said.

Linda Frost said she is a proud mom.

“It was kind of funny, painting a public building and not getting into trouble,” she said. In the end, she enjoyed watching them create.

“Every time I looked up, they did something that would make me go, ‘Whoa,'” she said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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