Baker High School is adding color to its interior walls, beginning with students painting a mural in the science hallway, representing the various sciences.

Jill Nelson, who monitors the computer lab at BHS, said other teachers proposed the mural and students started work on the project last year.

She got together with her class to brainstorm possible ideas for the mural. They had smaller groups who collaborated to get some ideas going. As a large group, they decided on the design.

The mural begins with six scientists painted in the Pop Art theme of Andy Warhol — Amy Mainzer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye, Jane Goodall and Michio Kaku.

Nelson said seniors Koedi Birmingham and Morgan Stone worked on the scientists.

The mural moves through the past with woolly mammoths and dinosaurs with a comet flying overhead.

“It’s pretty cool,” said Johnny Zhang, a sophomore and exchange student from China who painted the dinosaurs.

The mural then moves into the present with horses, cows, elk, trout, among other objects. Birmingham said the students wanted to paint animals they can see locally.

Viewers can also see the fourth doctor from the long-running TV series, “Doctor Who.” Nelson said they will have the Doctor’s T.A.R.D.I.S (Time And Relative Dimension In Space — the box the titular character travels in) in the sky at one point.

“We kind of all had random ideas of like putting in different scientific characters from different shows and movies, and a lot of people like Doctor Who and I know Mrs. Nelson does too so we went with it,” Birmingham said.

The mural continues into the future and will eventually feature a cityscape. So far the unfinished scene has the periodic table, the Ghostbusters creating a black hole, and an astronaut.

“Summer Curry, she is our astronaut,” Nelson said, referring to the BHS custodian and military veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “She wanted to know if she could be the astronaut, I said sure! So, we have her there as the astronaut. It’s just a fun mural, we’ve just been at it for a while, it’s quite a bit of space to fill up.”

Other students who are helping with the project are seniors Wraylee Setzkorn and Emily Thornton.

“These guys have been working hard and they’re awesome,” Nelson said. “They’ve been putting in a lot of time, a lot of Fridays, a lot of volunteer time to just come in and work on it.”

Nelson has been approached by other teachers, asking if she will paint a mural in their section of the school, including social sciences and English.

“I guess we’ll just kind of do a themed mural for all the different hallways and go from there,” Nelson said.

The final project will have a quote from Stephen Hawking: “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”