CHALK ART: PRACTICE SESSION 1

Who would've known that I'd be dabbling with chalk pastels...on the pavement! I was invited by a friend of mine to join her for the Chalk On The Boardwalk competition at Steveston Village on Canada Day. We quickly drew out some ideas and experimented with chalk. This was done at Mt. Pleasant park and we spent a good amount of hours during the hottest part of the day. The theme: "Capture the spirit of the day."

Lily wanted to do a 3D effect with the painting. Naturally, if it involves chalk art on the sidwalk, this is the way to go! These were the preliminary sketches in an attempt to capture the spirit of the day. I thought of integrating something from Steveston Village (Orca and Salmon) and Canada Day (Actual people interacting with the painting which I would guess, have some representation of Canada on their person). I had the idea in mind, but little did I know the technique and how much work goes into it. We went with the first one on the upper left to try out with chalk on a 10ftx10ft pavement.

This is a shot of the colors I used for this fish. I quickly learned how chalk behaved on pavement. I really needed to pack it in every nook and cranny for the powder to stick.

Trying to blend different colors for the next fish. This guy is jumping out of the water with his belly up.

Working on the orca now coming out of the pool in the ground. I quickly learned that a sponge brush worked well enough to spread the chalk as opposed to my hand. I only felt the effect of a palm exfoliation after. It turned the pads of my fingers quite red and sensitive to running water.

Heat? No excuses. The sun was scorching hot, people were in the park working on their color and we were making some headway with ours. (I had to extend my arms skyward, straining and struggling to take a picture blindly with my phone to get the correct angle for the fishes to look like they're jumping out. People should be able to take a picture just below their eye level for the effect to work so I knew there was something wrong with the distortion. There wasn't any "step by step" instructions on the internet to get this right, so this idea had to be scrapped eventually!)
 

There was a baby orca that I couldn't finish that day. So we decided to pack up and come back another day. We left a nice little message just to let the community know that yes, It's our mess and we intend to clean it up!