Martinez is teaching her students a glaze painting technique, applying thin layers of paint over base colors that will add depth to the final product. The result of the glaze is a brown skin that is really five different shades of browns, blues and violet. Corners of the mural still have the vibrant violet showing. Eventually, a student in a boom truck will paint over it to match the cerulean sky and wispy clouds.

"You put a color down, but ultimately you don't know what color it's going to be until you put the next color on it," Martinez said.

Translating the painting from a 3-foot canvas to a wall hundreds of times that large hasn't been smooth. The process requires constant adjusting.

"This looks great at this size, but once you get it up there, everything changes," Martinez said, which is why she directs students from below the scaffolding as they scramble between the metal planks and poles. "As you come up here, you lose the whole painting."

Student Barbara Jerome said she has seen people peeking over fences to look at the wall. Jerome won a contest earlier this fall for a future mural design depicting Utah's prehistoric heritage through cliff dwellings in the southern part of the state all the way through modern Salt Lake City. Her mural may be among those Martinez's future classes paint.

"I think it would be very cool to see your own painting on the side of a huge building," Jerome said. She hopes that UTA will consider a dedicated tour of the murals along the line for school field trips.

Standard Builder Supplies owner Mike Hansen said the project has been nothing but good news for his company and employees; it also seems to be subduing graffiti on neighboring buildings.

"I like the artistry of it," Hansen said. "It's been nice to enable those kids to have a place to do it. They've been very polite and we've been accommodating so it's worked out very nicely for all of us."

UTA and South Salt Lake split the cost of the TRAX beautification project. The paint, about 30 gallons for the whole semester, scaffolding, truck rental and supervision by South Salt Lake official costs about $5,000 per mural. The grants also pay for a trip for the class to fine art galleries in New York or Los Angeles as a way of compensating students for their work. "We can't give them a wage, but many of them haven't been to New York," Martinez said. "It's an investment in their educations."

The building owners who host the murals agree to leave them for at least five years, and the class hopes to apply an anti-graffiti glaze over the finished mural, which would allow workers to rinse off vandals' marks. South Salt Lake is home to eight murals, including Martinez's current project, and Salt Lake City has one. Other TRAX stations have sculptures, paintings or signs sponsored with the same source of money from UTA that helped pay for the most recent mural.

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E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com