By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — Moove over Mr. Ed, the latest neighborhood beautification project in Constitution Hill is a real porker.

Seriously folks, there’s no stockyard here — it’s just art. Call it barnyard chic.
With the help of a professional muralist, a group of neighborhood kids have transformed a plain-old garden shed on Olo Street into a scene reminiscent of “Animal Farm,” replete with a horse, cow, pig and some chickens. They look so authentic, you have to do a double take to make sure that’s not a real horse sticking his head out of the top half of a Dutch door.
“It is beautiful,” says Margaux Morisseau, director of community building for Neighborworks Blackstone River Valley. “But what’s really great is that the neighbors all love it.”
The barnyard scene was the brainchild of six children enrolled in Neighborworks Youth RAP, or Resident Assistance Program. The program provides children from the Constitution Hill area, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, with summer employment, internships and supplemental educational programs, according to Morisseau.
Under the tutelage of muralist Betty Lee Turner, the children have worked several hours every Tuesday and Wednesday for the last seven weeks to transform the shed into an optical illusion of a living barnyard, earning $6 an hour.
The shed belongs to Neighborworks and is used for storing equipment needed to tend the community garden the agency maintains near Olo and Center streets, according to Morisseau.
“We had been looking at a few sites around the neighborhood,” she says. “We looked at a wall, we looked at the Tyra Club, we looked at a fence. Then we looked at the shed and decided that was it.”
Jeanne Alvarez, 13, one of the children who painted the lifelike livestock, still can’t believe how good the project turned out.
“It makes you feel like you’re in a real barn,” she says. “It looks realistic.”
In addition to Alvarez, the other young artists who participated include Awa Ndiaye, Kombeh Ceesay and Christopher Holman, all 13, Binetou Keita-Diouf, 14, and Ashley Martinez, 11.
Turner, the muralist, says the project was a lesson in patience and discipline for the children as well as artistic technique.
A Lincoln resident, Turner is a Woonsocket native whose murals are on display in some very conspicuous locations around the state, including Hasbro Children’s Hospital, the Veterans Administration Hospital, the India Restaurant in Providence, and others. Murals are her primary medium, though she also spearheaded a tile mosaic at St. Agatha’s Church in the Fairmount section last year.
The shed, she said, was unpainted “raw wood” and needed to be completely primed before her young charges began tackling the details. To create convincing images of the animals, they worked from “underdrawings” - sketches that were later transferred to the wooden structure in a process she likens to an oversized paint-by-numbers project.
The children worked for two to three hours at a clip, often under a hot sun, but they seemed to mind less than she did, said Turner.
The Youth RAP children have just two more sessions to put the finishing touches on the project, which won’t be done, at least not officially, until Wednesday afternoon.
“They’re doing some amazing work,” said Turner. “And they’re making a big difference in that neighborhood.”