I was asked by the Downtown Sioux Falls folks to be a featured artist at their Chalk the Walk First Friday Night in September. So just completed this last night. A very interesting challenge for me as an artist. This is the first time I have ever worked with chalk in this way. I planned to do two full days, take my time and learn as I go. Thursday it rained off and on and the wind kept blowing my chalk everywhere. So I packed it in early, frustrated wondering if I can even pull this off. I got up way too early Friday (still dark out) to start again. Got a cup of coffee at Get n' Go and braced for a long day of work.
I will walk through the process I took. The above pic is my first sketches of the design I settled on. I decided to go with the four local high schools because it connects with the city, it was Presidents Bowl Weekend and it seemed to fit. I didn't want to directly mimic their logos, I went with a hybrid of each (or as I like to say to folks - the mascots I wish they would use, HA). I augmented 2 clipart images I purchased online and kind of made up the other two - trying to find a "buff picture" of Teddy Roosevelt is rough. Maybe that is why Roosevelt doesn't have a "Teddy" mascot image and uses 2 R's. After a lot of sketching I liked the way these looked together - I tried to not let one dominate over the other.
After I sketched them out I colored them up a bit to get a sense of the chalk I would need to acquire and if I had the school colors correct. I also began to go online and study how the "pros" do it. I learned a ton, in areas I never would have thought of when working on an unforgiving surface with a medium that is crumbly, weak, messy and gives you the goose-bumps when you work with it (remember the old fingernails on the chalkboard). That's me and one of the reason I have never liked or worked in chalk. Just thinking of it makes my skin crawl - there was always one kid in the class who would drag his fingernails slowly down the board and send us into the shakes.
Above is the final version which is 12 x 12 in size. After the first day of getting rained on and windswept I figured out a few things to make day two work. I found out it is a good idea to lay down a pallet on rough concrete of washable tempura paint, for two reasons, it gives you a nice canvas and two - provides something besides the concrete for the chalk to adhere to. Chalk won't grab onto concrete, but it will grab the tempura base, this keeps your chalk from blowing everywhere - especially if you have the cheap hobby lobby chalk like mine was and secondly, I found it makes the blending process much easier on your hands. Downside - to get it off the concrete you will have to scrub it some with brushes and soap, but if it rains it won't wash away so easily (as I found out on day one when one drop of rain can obliterate it). I decided to go with a black background (instead of white) to let the images pop more. The extra hour of getting that black down was well worth the time. Next, I gridded it out in white chalk which was easy to see on black and transferred my images in simple classroom white chalk and began to fill in the colors grid by grid.
The project took about 17 hours to complete - it is extremely painful on the back and knees. Getting out of bed today was not an easy task (I ache everywhere). Whenever you create you make changes and adjustments - something you get used to when you work on large images in weird locations. I changed up the colors some to make it jump more and I added some lines at the finish to make it seem as if the images are active. I found getting the chalk wet and using a brush to paint it on was awesome and a trick the folks next to me were doing. Mixing in tempura which is just liquid chalk also was fantastic. Chalk is made of tempura paint, water and plaster of paris, then hardened. I found out online that the sidewalk pros make their own chalk so they get the more vibrant colors they desire. The other featured artist bought his chalk from a guy in Michigan, he must make it because his chalk colors were brilliant and you could tell the difference between store bought chalk and that stuff.
Heard the thunder early this morning and thought, all that work and it could be gone with a thunderstorm in minutes - luckily it blew by. I'm glad because there are lots of folks running around downtown today for the Sidewalk Arts Festival.
Great project to tackle, difficult on my old man's body. Bottom line - awesome to see folks really enjoying it and taking pictures of it with their kids, especially in front of the school they attended or are rooting for this weekend at the President's Bowl games. If I do it again I would like to try a 3-D affect. That would be both challenging but fun.
If you want me to do a chalk mural in front of your school, business, church, in a gym, lobby or whatever - get ahold of me and we'll talk!
