Chalking it Up

Today was a fun day! Gorgeous weather to counter those hurricane remnant clouds passing through last night, so I headed over to the 18th annual Chalk Festival hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art. It's ongoing all this weekend (Sunday's hours are 12-5) and the artwork will last until the next rainfall, so you should all go check it out as it's really awesome.

As you can see, most of the people who participate are just families from Cleveland and such- you can pay for a certain-sized square and they'll give you some fine-quality chalk, so you can just get to work on doing whatever you want. There are also a few professional artists working too-
But yes, lots of creative chalkers! Here's one I particularly liked, titled "Snakes on a Plane"...
Here's another gorgeous set, which honestly look for all the world like a few Monet paintings just walked out of the art museum and laid themselves on the pavement-
Here's another nice one, which is clearly a work in progress and wont' be finished until tomorrow. A lot of people get really serious about the chalk festival, and are there the whole weekend. (For those who don't recognize it, the building is Adelbert, the CWRU administrative building where the president and provost and all those lovely people hang out.)
After seeing all this great artwork, I decided to throw my lot in the ring and do my own chalking. I was a bit intimidated by the other artists to be honest- I can't draw most things at all, and forever envy those who do- but I do have a good cartoonish style of many a deep space object thanks to years of doodling in my notebook margins and having a one-track mind. So after two hours, here's my end result-
Hooray for the Mars rover! This is probably the biggest piece of artwork I've ever done by the way- here's a picture with me in it for scale-
So anyway, I am quite proud of my piece and now get to obsessively worry about the prospects of rain for a little while (luckily we're in that time of year with perpetual blue skies, so it says "sunny" for the next ten days of forecast!). I had a lot of fun though and still have quite a bit of chalk, so perhaps tomorrow I'll be heading back to do another square. And if I don't, no one will complain too loudly if I use my meager artistic skills on some other nice piece of sidewalk around campus, right?