A pack of dogs will descend on downtown Butler this summer, but they will leave behind art not destruction.

That’s because the Walldogs are a group of sign painters and mural artists from all over the world who have decided to have their national Walldog Meet in Butler from July 27 to 31.

Once a year, hundreds of Walldogs gather in a town or city to paint multiple murals and old-time advertisements on the walls of buildings.

The Butler Brush-Up, as this year’s gathering is known, has already picked eight of the 10 locations that will get the Walldogs’ attention, said Pat Collins, administrative director of the Butler County Historical Society.

Collins, who was instrumental in getting the artists to come to Butler, after seeing their work in downtown Pontiac, Ill., in 2012, said “Back in the 1880s, the painters who hung off barns painting the Mail Pouch signs were called dogs. Painters who painted walls, walldogs.”

“This group has been doing this for over 20 years,” Collins said.

The historical society arranged for the Walldogs to converge in Butler with the help of Butler County’s own Walldog, Jill Welsh, who owns Jill’s Custom Signs in Middlesex Township.

“This is like a family reunion,” Collins said. “It’s 100 artists from all over the world. We have people coming from Barbados, New Zealand. These are fantastic artists, and we’re getting them to come here.”

The artists will paint the 10 murals around the downtown while the meet takes place, Collins said.

The murals will range along Main Street in an area between Washington and McKean streets, and Wayne and North streets.

The subjects will include Butler’s steel industry, pioneers, Gen. Richard Butler and ’50s diners/drive-ins.

“They’re intended to be a draw for the city to increase tourism and encourage people and businesses to move here,” Collins said.

There could be 100 artists at work during the event, said Scott Lindley, a graphics artist and sign painter in Mount Pulaski, Ill., and the mural coordinator for the Walldogs’ Butler visit.

“Right now, registration is 75 to 80 people,” Lindley said, adding the numbers could rise before July.

“Think about it like this: there will be four or five artists on a project at the same time,” said Lindley. “It is a four-day power paint. They will work in teams. Someone is constantly on the wall painting. If there was tag-team wrestling in painting, this is what it would be like.”

As coordinator, Lindley said his duties will range from finding the right paint, mixing the right shade of color and maybe even painting a bit himself.

Lindley said the 10 murals’ subjects were selected by the 10 lead artists from the best 25 subjects submitted to his group by the historical society.

“What we are trying to do is promote tourism and get the community to understand its history,” he added.

“We try to keep with historic accuracy; we try to keep the process as streamlined as possible,” Lindley said.

Collins said “There will be music and all kind of other things going on” while the artists are working.

Collins said there is much to get done before the artists arrive in July.

She is seeking volunteers to help clean and prime walls before the artists paint them, provide artists with ladders and scaffolding, and give artists a place to sleep and meals to eat.

Collins said people interested in volunteering should go to www.butlerwalldogs.com, download a volunteer registration form from the site and return the completed form to the historical society at 123 W. Diamond St.

Lindley said project managers will be paid by money raised from local mural sponsorships.

In the meantime, Collins said plans for the event must go before the city’s planning and zoning commissions for approval next month before being presented to the city council for final approval.

Lindley said his group’s efforts this summer will last far into the future.

“In the past, if you painted ads on the sides of barns instead of in a sign shop, you were the lowest on the totem pole,” Lindley said.

“The beautiful thing is their work is still around. You can still see it in ghost images all over the country,” he said.