She gently uses a brown, colored pencil to shade in the forehead of a portrait of Moses, a Ugandan orphan who lost both parents to AIDS.

It’s likely these two will never meet, but Moses will soon have a keepsake to call his own, thanks to the work of Radulovic and the other students in Tina Niemi’s advanced placement art class at Bradford High School.

The students are participating for the second year in the Memory Project, which connects student-artists with orphans overseas and makes sure they have a keepsake to call their own. The students receive photos of orphans and have their choice of creating a portrait in colored pencil, acrylic or oil paints.

When the portraits are finally done, they’ll be packaged and hand-delivered to the orphans, who will then get a picture taken with their portrait and the image will be sent back to the students.

It costs $15 per student to cover costs of getting photos and delivering the finished portraits, but that cost was picked up by Bradford’s InfraRed marketing students.

The program is the brainchild of Ben Schumaker, a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was inspired to start the Memory Project while volunteering in Guatemala in 2003.

He met a man who was an orphan as a child, who told him he and his friends had few possessions to call their own. He said any special items children would receive would contribute to their own self-worth. Since then more than 20,000 portraits have been delivered to those in need in dozens of foreign countries, according to information at the Memory Project Web site (www.thememoryproject.org).

Schumaker tries to get several portraits from different artists to give to the orphans so they have a variety of pictures of themselves.

Last year’s Bradford students did portraits of children from Ecuador, and even got letters back from some of them.

“Since this is an (advanced placement) class, I want them to do one portrait of some kind, and have that tied into community service,” Niemi said. “This makes a difference for them, too, because it raises awareness in youth, and builds compassion for when they’re older. Some of the girls in the class last year got tears in their eyes when they got responses back.”

Students are pretty much allowed to choose their own art form for the project, but Niemi stays away from charcoal and pastels so they won’t smear. From time to time she offers advice.

“Danielle was having a hard time drawing the eyes yesterday, so we turned the picture over and looked at them as shapes,” Niemi said. “Sometimes you want to draw what you think you see.”

Another student takes a photocopy of his photo and sections it off in grids. Then he’ll create his picture on a larger piece of paper one grid at a time so he can focus more on detail.

Radulovic, 16, isn’t quite happy with her work yet, but patiently layers in colors across the forehead.

“I’m not even close to done yet,” she said. “I guess it looks OK.”

She leans back and examines her work so far. “It makes me feel good to do it,” she said. “Even if it means for just a split second we can make a difference in their lives.”