Santa Barbara I Madonnari Festival, May 2011

We were sponsored for a third year by plastic surgeon Howard Gross, MD, and decided to challenge ourselves by combining three Alphonse Mucha paintings: Topaz, Amethyst, and Emerald from his Gemstone series. Alphonse Mucha was a painter and poster artist from the Art Nouveau period at the end of the nineteenth century. His paintings feature beautiful women surrounded by lots of detail. The joke among street painters is, "he who paints the Mucha finishes last." As we were unable to stay for the third day of I Madonnari, we had to break that curse. To add to the challenge, we decided to skew the paintings so that if viewed in the right place they would appear to pop up off the pavement.

We were joined by our crack backgrounder Jack (his sister Megan had a previous engagement) on Sunday.

The original paintings (with modifications to fit the space).

We started on Friday because we knew this painting would take longer than our usual 16-20 hours. That day we tried to get backgrounds for the three medallions complete so we could transfer the details over the backgrounds on Saturday.

Wayne adds spots behind the center figure.

Cheryl adds a background around the Topaz figure.

The Amethyst figure has a face but no hair, and Wayne has begun work on detailing her medallion.

Cheryl works on her hair while Wayne continues work on the surrounding medallion.

By Saturday afternoon we had the top part of Amethyst and most of her medallion done.

Sunday morning status--there's a lot to do in one day!

By lunchtime on Sunday, Amethyst was nearly complete.

Wayne had been busy at work on the Emerald medallion.

Cheryl smooths out Emerald’s nose.

Wayne and Jack work on the background while Cheryl continues on Emerald.

Jack was very careful as he worked between the two medallions.

This is what's called painting yourself into a corner.

Wayne spruces up the Topaz medallion.

Jack has a green thumb, and other verdant digits.

Wayne shows off his yoga training to reach a bit of loose chalk.

Jack was really painted into a corner on the left side, so Wayne came to his aid.

The view from the top.

Finished!

Closeup of Topaz

Closeup of Amethyst

Closeup of Emerald. We decided to name her armrest (and the snake in her hair) Fluffy. We're not sure what Fluffy-the-Armrest really is...there are snake and feline features to it, and perhaps a pig nose. Dragon, maybe?

Another upside down view

Here's how it looked on Monday morning.

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