SCAD Sidewalk Arts Festival 2013

Hello all! Yesterday was the Sidewalk Arts Festival in Savannah and I had a blast as usual chalking it up with my friends and fellow alumni/students. This year I decided to do something a bit different and took inspiration for a very abstracted photo I took of a glass building in Jacksonville, FL. I laid out the grid work first and then realized that it would be very hard to generate all the different blues and blue-greens I needed for the glass so I simply picked out all the cool colors in my chalk pack and went to town making a plaid-like pattern. I am very happy with how it turned out and I had a lot of nice comments from people who walked by. A few people were even brave enough to come up and ask me what I graduated with from SCAD. A few thought graphic design was my major, but I don't think they were fully surprised when I said architecture. I hope you enjoy my square and be on the look out for more photos soon. Keep it REAL!

Flashback Friday #17 - Sidewalk Arts Festival

This weekend I will be attending the 32nd annual Sidewalk Arts Festival hosted by my now alma mater SCAD! I have participated in it every year for the past 4 and have had a wonderful time drawing with my fellow artists. This year I will be attending as an alumni and will get to draw my 5th square! Looking back on my past squares I started to see a pattern. My first square was themed around one of my favorite artists, M. C. Escher, and I used some of the lizards and fish that constantly cropped up in his geometric and mind-bending artwork. The next year I decided to do an Italian themed square since that following summer I was going on an academic trip to Italy with SCAD. It rained that year so I was able to literally paint the chalk onto the sidewalk and that is why the colors look so vivid. My third year I decided to use my favorite animal, the turtle, as my inspiration and came up with a graphic four-leaf turtle clover design. Several people thought it looked like a flower, which was cool because it is interesting to know what other people see in geometric or abstract art. With that being said my fourth year I took inspiration from a photograph I made of the Pantheon in Rome while on that academic trip with SCAD. So far that square has been my most successful since almost everyone who walked by stopped to look at it or photograph it. I even had the president of SCAD, Paula Wallace, stop and ask questions about it. It was also successful because the people who walked by had very different ideas about what it was. Some people thought it was a floor pattern, or perhaps a sun-burst, or an endless tunnel - one person even thought it was the Hadron Collider at CERN! That's pretty cool too! Needless to say I enjoyed making all of these squares and the unintentional pattern that I mentioned earlier goes - Geometric Reptile - Italy - Geometric Reptile - Italy. So, what will I do this year? Will I continue the pattern or will I throw myself a crazy chalk art curve ball? I guess you will just have to come out to the festival and see for yourself (or just wait till next week for my next blog post!). To read my posts about last year's Festival you can click Here, Here and.... Here! Keep it REAL!

Happy 2 Year Anniversary!

This month marks 2 whole years for this blog! 185 Posts, 200+ Photos and stories, and over 13,000 views from you - my faithful readers! Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have enjoyed my recent posts as well as my ongoing Flashback Friday series. I look forward to making even more new and exciting material to share. Please feel free to comment and ask questions any time and, as always, Keep it REAL!

Flashback Friday #16 - Comic Books

I have been in Lake Helen, FL for the past few days, but I felt I could still get a blog post out this week. The Flashback part of this Friday has to do with Comic Books! Some of you may know that over the past couple of years I have begun to inherit a large comic book collection. The books I have received have been all across the map and have been as old as 1960's/1970's and as new as 2013. Sometimes I even get the books on my doorstep before they are in stores (or just after)! It all started in 2007 when I befriended one of my dorm neighbors freshman year at college. Her name was Lauren and little did I know at the time but her father Bruno was an avid collector of comic books and had been collecting for many years. One day Bruno asked his daughter if there was anyone of her friends at school who might want some comic books. This seemed like a great idea since she went to an art school and quite a few people there were actually studying comic book art (sequential art). So she gave him some names and found some addresses and he sent out a few boxes of comics. A little while later Lauren decided to put my name in the mix and I received a box one summer day in 2008. I had no idea it was coming and I had no idea what to expect when I opened it, but inside were about 50 books! I quickly sat down and wrote Bruno a note thanking him for the great and unexpected gift I had just had the pleasure of opening. Very soon after that I started to receive box after box after box of comic books for it seemed no one else had taken the time to write Bruno back about the books. To me it was the only natural way of accepting the books and by doing so I must have cemented my place as main comic book recipient. Over the next few years I amassed a huge collection of books that I have greatly enjoyed. In recent years I too started to give some out to my friends as gifts just like Bruno did for me. I have even mailed some to friends who live elsewhere and have sent some as far away as Hong Kong! I still get excited every time a box arrives as I get to sort through whatever new titles Bruno has sent me. But that first box was still the best and I remember the day I got it like it was yesterday. The generosity of some people will always amaze me, and it also goes to show you the power of a simple thank you. It goes a lot farther than one might think - about 3,000+ comic books far! Thanks for reading and Keep it REAL!

Flashback Friday #15 - Utah

Happy Flashback Friday everyone! #15! As I promised last week I am going to talk about my church trip to Utah way back in the summer of 2005. It was one part mission trip, one part pilgrimage, and all parts fun. The journey started off much like any other, with a trip to the airport, but when we all arrived at our gate we were faced with a dilemma - our flight was 4 hours delayed! There was some pretty nasty weather were our first flight was supposed to land in Newark, NJ so we had to wait it out. But with the delay we missed our connecting flight in Newark and were stuck for an entire day with no bags in New Jersey. First of all, I have no idea why air traffic would have us fly from Florida to New Jersey and then to Utah, (...weird...) but second we got to have an unexpected adventure in New York City. The church I went on the trip with (Christ Episcopal Church) had a connection at the time with Trinity Church in New York so we called them up and they invited us over. We got to tour Trinity Church as well as St. Paul's and also got to see ground zero before any of the memorial construction had started. It was the first time I had ever been to New York so the experience was quite fantastic and powerful. The next day we made it to Utah and went about the mission part of our trip, which was to help clean, paint, and repair parts of a local town. That part was also a very meaningful experience because for the first time I witnessed poverty in the United States. It's not like I did not know it was present, but I have been lucky enough in my life to have lived in some pretty wealthy communities and being in that small town was very eyeopening to see how rough some parts of the US really are. I remember my specific job was to help paint street curbs because the town did not have the proper funds for road maintenance. It was actually pretty tough work since it was the summer in Utah (hot, hot hot!), but it felt good to help out. After that we started our pilgrimage part which was a river rafting tour on the Colorado River. We spent a few days and nights on the river on these pontoon type of river rafts that took about 10 people each. We had special guides with us the whole time who were really fun and liked to joke with each other by starting water fights or diving off rocks into the river. Every evening we camped out on the river bank and had the most amazing views of the ancient cliffs formed over thousands of years by the river. We also had fun playing a huge game of battleship on the beach one night with big pieces of driftwood as the ships and one of our guides told us a funny story about a French group they took down the river that they fed french toast too one morning - the French folk asked "What is this egg bread..?" We all thought that was hilarious. And every night our church leaders lead us in prayer as we marveled at the wonder of the creation that surrounded us in that place. I believe the trip touched everyone in a different way, but for me it was one of the only times I have ever felt as calm and at peace with the world. I hope to one day venture back there and experience it again. Until next time readers - Keep it REAL!

Flashback Friday Special - Utah

Friday kinda sneaked up on my this week so I will have to give you a preview of the regular flashback I have planned for next week! What we have here is a photo I took during a church trip way back in the summer of 2005. On this trip we went on a river rafting tour on the Colorado River and camped out every night on the river bank. It was certainly an amazing and unforgettable experience and this photo shows the view I had from my sleeping bag the first night we camped out. I had a natural famed view of the stars all during the night. It was magnificent. Stay tuned readers and Keep it REAL!