Long Island teen artists debut ‘absolutely beautiful’ mural commissioned by hometown officials

They really know how to paint the town.

A pair of highly talented student artists from Long Island were recently given the opportunity of a lifetime when they transformed their works into a 12-foot-high, 80-foot-wide mural now proudly displayed along a local road on the North Shore.

“This was the biggest canvas we ever had,” said Glen Cove High School sophomore Giorgina Dondero, 14, to The Post.

“I still can’t get over the spectacle of how big it turned out.”

Giorgina and her 15-year-old bestie, Nahla Loret Gomez, also a 10th-grader at Glen Cove, had entered an art competition at the end of the past school year, and their super skills with a brush caught the eye of the town’s beautification commission.

Nahla’s illustration of a monarch butterfly over a potted plant took first place at the event and was printed on t-shirts as part of a campaign by the local government, while Giorgina’s work of a tree-filled road — inspired by nearby Morgan Park, where she has done beach cleanups — was a close runner-up.

Glen Cove’s government then recruited the two pals to paint a modified design of Giorgina’s piece, with nods to Nahla’s work, for a lengthy stretch on Mill Hill Road last month.

Nahla said the volunteer opportunity opened up a whole new world for her.

“Art was kind of something that I kept to myself. I was just kind of doing doodling on paper,” she said. “I never joined competitions, ever, because I was very shy.

“Now I would love to do more things like this, it brought me out of my shell.”

The finished product vividly showed Glen Cove in all four seasons and represented “just something absolutely beautiful — and how nature can affect us all in a similar emotional response,” Giorgina said.

It definitely was a labor of love.

The girls got to work in the midst of a miserably muggy August heatwave, where temperatures reached close to 100 degrees.

“There was definitely some summer heat stroke trauma that brought us closer together,” quipped Giorgina, who wants to attend the California Institute of the Arts for college.

“But we really developed a deeper connection when we worked together on this piece of art that was inspired by us both.”

The girls weren’t alone in conquering what seemed like a gargantuan task. A local muralist in the area caught wind of the project and volunteered supplies, also offering the two students some lessons on how to handle such a large undertaking.

Lora Cusumano, the beautification commission’s chair, even picked up a brush and was scaling fences to help fill in the roadside work’s tallest end.

“The things that people said to us as we were painting — the people who lived around here were so thrilled to see it being done,” Cusumano said.

As several other neighbors in the area caught wind of the project, they also volunteered to paint, and one even brought cookies and snacks for the team of nearly a dozen.

“It was definitely empowering seeing so many people feel so strongly that they wanted to help us,” Giorgina said.

Glen Cove budgeted a week to do the project, but the artists’ strength in numbers expedited the timeline to only three days.

“Now every time I’m going home, my family and I always take this route to see the mural,” Nahla said.

“This is a part of my home now.”