Isabella Dotson stood behind her desk carefully using a pencil to sketch on her mostly blank mask constructed of plaster.

The plan, the drawing to her left shows, is to create a classic comedy-tragedy mask in black and white. The process is slow, though, and she’s found translating her two-dimensional drawing to a contoured surface challenging.

“The sketching is most difficult,” she said, “because it’s rough.”

It’s the Warring elementary student’s first time drawing on such a surface, and that’s the idea, Kathy Orza said.

Orza’s fifth-grade art classes this year are making plaster masks, a project made possible through a grant from Vassar College.