Category — Chalk Art

Early on in my chalk art career, before I ever attended any comic conventions like Wizard World or New York Comic Con, I hit up art festivals and art walks as a way to display my street art. And really that is how it begins for any street painter, you get down on the street and you create something, all the while hoping that no one tells you you’re not allowed to do this before you are done. At least the art festivals would close a street so we could work.

Since I began creating chalk art and street art murals, I have made a number of Alex Ross painting recreations. The blended style of his work, plus his iconic take on comic book heroes using a realistic approach to lighting and proportions, not only makes them amazingly fun to draw but really darn impressive when finished. In fact, my favorite mural I’ve made was an Alex Ross Captain America image for the 2008 New York Comic Con, you can find a post on that here.

I have been a huge fan of Star Wars since I was a little kid. I still remember waiting in line for Return of the Jedi like it was just last summer. I rushed out of school to the local mall only to find a line of 72 (I counted) people already waiting to see the movie which didn’t even start for another 5 agonizing hours.

I have been a huge fan of Joe Madureira’s work for a long time now. Unfortunately, I stopped collecting comics on a monthly basis a few years before he first appeared on the scene penciling Uncanny X-Men for Marvel Comics. Later, as I followed the comic scene through outside sources like Wizard Magazine, I started seeing his work pop up from time to time, especially when his Battle Chasers series hit through Wildstorm Comics Cliffhanger imprint in the late 90′s.

I got to a lot of conventions, and I have seen a lot of strange, weird, odd, abnormal stuff. But by far, one of the most interesting conventions I have been to is the Otakon in Baltimore, MD. This is an Anime, Manga and Asian Pop Culture convention created by a grass-roots fan base. It takes place every summer at the Baltimore Convention Center and has become a Mecca for all lovers of these various art forms.

In 2008, a gentleman had seen me at the New York Anime Festival creating a giant Voltron chalk mural, and asked if I would be interested in attending the NY Toy Fair just two months later to create a piece for his booth. After some back and forth, we settled on an image of Star Wars. Oh, but not just any image, this was going to be a recreation of one of the original Ralph McQuarrie concept art paintings from the first film way back in 1977. A number of these concept paintings had recently been turned into limited edition action figures so the fit was perfect for the Toy Fair.

One of my favorite shows to go to is the NY Comic Con. Run by the awesome folks over at Reed Exhibitions, the show has grown larger and larger each year to become one of the premiere pop culture events on the east coast. With NY Comic Con 2009 coming up on February 6-8, I thought this would be a good time to post about LAST years show and the chalk art mural that I made.

I was asked to recreate an Alex Ross painting for the NY Comic Con in 2008 as he was to be one of the guests of honor. I have loved Mr. Ross’ art ever since I first saw his work with Marvels back in 1994. His painterly style really lends itself to these chalk art drawings because the blended colors can be recreated with the chalk medium quite accurately.

In the spring of 2008, I was asked to make a chalk art mural at a science museum that was hosting the official “Earth Fest” celebration for Earth Day. This presented an interesting situation, as up to this point I had mostly created comic book character murals for public appearances. I tried briefly to figure out how I could force a comic character into an Earth Fest mural project. The DC Comics character Poison Ivy came to mind, but two details made me reject that idea pretty quick.

I’ve loved the work of painter Marko Djurdjevic even before I knew who he actually was. I’d seen Marvel Comics characters painted with incredible style and power, but never caught the name of the artist. It was later that I not only learned who he was, but that I had been seeing his stuff for a long time on one of the art forums I am a member of, conceptart.org (I even have this in my blogroll.) The guy is absolutely amazing and puts pretty much the rest of us to shame. I met Marko at the Wizard World convention in Dallas in 2007, he’s also a really nice guy to boot!

There are two basic forms of chalk art. The first is called Madonnari, this is the traditional form of street painting that began in Italy probably in the 16th century. This is a non-distorted form of art where you attempt to recreate a painting, often one of the renaissance masters and usually with religious themes, as accurately as possible. The other is 3D Street Painting which is a more recent form of the art and uses forced perspective to create the illusion of a 3D object or landscape on the flat pavement (when viewed from a specific angle).