As Special As They Get

Cottrell Elementary
Dahlonega, GA 2026
Mural, Song & Music Video

The original track and music video "As Special As They Get" are currently being mixed & mastered in NYC!

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Twelve native flowers. One hundred young artists. A mural you can step inside.

The music video uses green screen and immersive projection to place young artists inside their own artwork — the mural becomes a moving image they can walk through. The song was written from words families actually said. The mural now lives on the wall of their school.

Check out the preview of the music video and song :

Cottrell Elementary partnered with visiting artists Sarah Conarro and Julian Bozeman of The Painted Cloud for a week-long artist-in-residence. The Painted Cloud teamed with 1st grade teacher Allison Head to write the grant and design the project. Together, approximately 100 young artists across all six 1st grade classes created a collaborative mural inspired by the native flowers and mountain landscape surrounding the school.

Young artists learned the song, practiced singing in unison, and recorded in small groups with microphones and headphones. They painted collaboratively — no single young artist painted a whole flower. The panels moved between classes. A mark made by one was built on by another. They experimented with green screen, filmed each other, ran the camera, and worked with cameras suspended from the ceiling — considering points of view and perspectives. They practiced being performer and audience. They trusted a process without knowing the outcome ahead of time.

The mural features 12 native flowers of the Blue Ridge Mountains: Dogwood, Cherokee Rose, Rhododendron, Mountain Laurel, Trillium, Fire Pink, Flame Azalea, Wild Columbine, Black-Eyed Susan, Goldenrod, Blue Violet, and Virginia Bluebells. These are the flowers that grow out of the ground the young artists walk on every day — a nearly complete color spectrum rooted in place. The flowers invite immediate joy, and also further knowledge — from identification to meaning to history.

The Cherokee Rose — Georgia's state flower — anchors the composition. Dahlonega comes from the Cherokee word "taulonica" meaning yellow metal. Gold runs through everything here: the name of the town, the history of the land, the goldenrod blooming in the fields, the center of the Cherokee Rose on the mural.

Families shaped the content. A questionnaire asked families to share a positive trait they see in their child, a favorite native flower, a term of endearment used at home, and what languages they speak. Those responses became the actual material — the lyrics in the song (see below!), the flowers on the mural.

The mural palette was matched to Cottrell Elementary's school colors and the colors of the land: the purple-blue of the Blue Ridge mountains, the golds of Dahlonega's goldenrod, the greens and reds of native flowers.

Through painting, songwriting, and video documentation, young artists explored what it means to contribute to something larger than themselves — and what happens when a whole community creates together.

The project was supported by the Alice Sampson-Cordle Artist-in-Residence Grant from the Lumpkin County Education Foundation, with support from principal Stacie Gerrells. Thanks to Jesse Perethian's shop class at Lumpkin County High School for cutting and prepping the mountain panels, Roman Gaddis for mandolin, and Cecelia and Owen Woody for saxophone.