Thursday, September 6, 2012

Chalk It Up Festival

When most people think of sidewalk chalk, they imagine little kids doodling on their driveways... when the artists of the Chalk It Up Festival think of sidewalk chalk, they dream big!

This past Labor Day weekend, I participated in the Chalk It Up Festival in downtown Sacramento. The Chalk It Up Festival takes place at the same park every year on Labor Day Weekend. Each year, local artists will come and decorate one of over 200 squares of sidewalk with sidewalk chalk. Each square is sponsored by a local business, and the artists will work on their squares all weekend long. The festival is hosted to raise money for children's arts education programs.

Besides walking around and looking at all of the chalk drawings, there are also craft and vendor booths, food stands, music, and activities for kids as well.


Prepping my square.
My drawing took just over two hours to complete. I was able to do a sidewalk square on the inside of the park, a bit smaller than the outer ones, but in the shade!

I used a photo I had taken a year or so ago as the inspiration for my drawing. After I had drawn a grid in my square and over the original photograph, I had to do a little photo editing in my head to figure out how I would make it work with sidewalk chalk, and with the colors I had.
 I'd never done anything like this before, so it took a little bit of experimenting to find out the best way to make things work. I used a couple of towels to rub in larger areas of chalk, as you can see, and I used a few brushes and my fingers to do the smaller, more detailed areas. My fingers were pretty chaffed at the end of the day!

Water also helped in creating different shades of chalk, and spreading it out more. If you mixed it just right, you could get your chalk to achieve a more paint-like quality, which was great for making it look more smooth.

I love this picture!

The underside of the flower and the shadowing were the hardest parts to figure out how to do. I had (mistakenly) not picked out a dark brown or black color in my set of chalks I bought, so I had to figure out a different way to do the shadowing. I ended up using purple and light blue to do it, and I really liked the way it turned out, especially on the petals.



Finishing up...
  I almost ran out of white chalk towards the end, but thankfully, I had just enough to finish up. My fingers were definitely tired by this point, but I was pleased with how it had turned out.

 I also discovered just how messy sidewalk chalk can be! Both of my rags were completely blue (they looked as though someone had tye-dyed them!) and my feet, knees and hands were covered in blue chalk as well. It took a couple of days to completely wash out the blue stains from my hands.


Finished!



Overall, though, I was happy with the way it came out, and I had a great time doing it. I'm definitely going to try and do it again next year.


You can view more photos of the drawings from the Chalk It Up Festival online at www.chalkitup.org .





1 comment:

  1. so beautiful and lovely idea to decorate the sidewalks and hearts =)
    I'll remember this as a step up when my little cousins ask to play outside =)

    xx Missy
    www.myconcretecatwalk.com

    ReplyDelete