As I hurtle blindly toward the end of the quarter, (construction project due Thursday, business plan due next Monday--ack!, and design project due two weeks from Wednesday), I thought I'd pause for a second ::gasp:: and show you pictures from last weekend's fun in Santa Barbara! <-- Mission Santa Barbara

It's called "I Madonnari, an Italian Street Painting Festival" and it's one of about a billion festivals/fiestas/excuses for a party that Santa Barbara throws each year. I Madonnari takes place in the asphalt plaza in front of the Santa Barbara Mission. Companies sponsor squares of various sizes (or the painters sponsor themselves, like we did). Kids can pay $10 for a 2'x2' square they can play in. Wayne and I traveled down to meet another group of online friends down there, and together we recreated in chalk--pastels, actually--a painting by the online group's founder, a guy named Howard Rheingold. The painting is of a mythic character known as a "greenman"--a face formed of leaves and other flora. Greenmen can be found on the walls of many cathedrals in Europe...they appear to be a Celtic icon. This particular greenman is on the psychedelic side, but Howard tends toward the psychedelic in dress himself. The first thing we did was duplicate a "cartoon"--an outline sketch of the painting on paper--onto the asphalt. Our square was 8' by 8', so we marked out a grid in the square and on the cartoon, then sketched each grid square onto the asphalt. This was the result:

Once the outline was done, we started filling it in. We'd fill in an area--not pressing too hard, as that would waste chalk--then run over the chalked area with a finger in a surgical glove (Wayne called them "finger condoms"). The latex glove smoothed out the chalk and saved our fingers. While we were rubbing pastels all over the asphalt (and ourselves), the woman who organized our gathering went out on a trading mission. The objective: trade away most of our reds and oranges for greens and blues. We knew we'd need a ton!

We started work Saturday morning, quit for swimming and dinner at around four, then returned Sunday morning and finished it up at around noon. Here's how it turned out:
Now, imagine a big plaza FULL of people creating these chalk paintings:
	(that's our space where the yellow umbrella is)
Here are a few of my favorites:

This dragon was done by Wavefront Technologies, a computer graphics firm in Santa Barbara that's been around for eons in computer graphics firm years (I remember them from when I was in college). They set up a bunch of 3D glasses hung from strings so that viewers could look at their dragon through the glasses. When you looked at the dragon using the glasses, it appeared to pop up off the surface of the asphalt.

This photo shows all the basic tools the chalk painter needs: pastels, somewhere to sit, and a Dustbuster to clear off excess chalk. I love the tromp l'oeil method used in this piece.

Last quarter, I based my design project design on some Maxfield Parrish paintings, and checked out a book about Parrish while preparing the project. This painting was in the book. It's a somewhat satirical self portrait.

Finally, this was a piece done by one of the local high schools. I love the concept of a tromp l'oeil Twister board!
We're already talking about coming back next year to do another block. I can't wait! Cheryl