Luna Park Chalk Art Festival, September 2013

The Luna Park Chalk Festival is a small, one day chalk festival located in one of San Jose's historic districts. Paintings are done on the sidewalks of the park, which gives us plenty of working space. But a one day festival limits what it is that we can do. This year we decided to do a trio of silly robots that we could pose people with in interactive ways.

San Jose, California boasts one of the best climates on earth. Temperatures are usually mild in September: overnight temperatures in the sixties and daytime temperatures in the 60's and 70's. Even in the winter, it is rare to see temperatures dip below freezing. And when it comes to rain, a normal year brings us between 12 and 18 inches. It hardly ever rains in San Jose before October and after May.

The Friday before the festival the weather was perfect: Blue skies, not too hot, not too cool. The day after the festival was the same: perfect California weather. So we were all caught by surprise by the downpour on the day of the festival. A half inch of rain fell on us between noon and 3:30 pm. (I know that some of you readers living in Florida, Hawaii, Oregon, and the North East are thinking: you light-weights! Well, 1/2" of rain in 3 hours is biblical for us. We were thinking about building an Ark!)

Over the years we have been rained on plenty of times. We have always been able to recover and finish the painting in some form or another. This is the first painting we have worked on where it was a total wash-out. If the festival had continued on Sunday we would have been able to recover. This is the risk of street painting in September.

Excuse me!

Hey! You!

This guy's head is almost as tall as I am.

Balloon head, with a carrot nose.

OW! My eyeballs! Where are my eyeballs?!?

I didn't quite get what she was telling the robot. But he seems very interested.

This kid. She's the one with the brains.

Two very skeptical girls.

And then the rain began. This is as far as we got.

The rain starts to speckle the chalk.

The speckles get closer together...

The head of this robot was approximately 10 feet tall.

The top-side image shows the distortion. The pavement is now more wet than dry. Hoods and umbrellas have been deployed.

Sideways: pink robot head...

...and the lower robots.

And then it became wet enough that things began to flow. People always ask us, "what happens if it rains?" This is what happens.

Puddle-Head.

Away go troubles, down the drain.

Underwater street painting

We couldn't get this sort of color if we wanted to. Sometimes things are magic.

Not only did our image get wet, but we discovered that the water from the path and the adjacent planting beds drained through our painting. There was a river of dirt and debris flowing across our painting.

On Sunday morning (after the storm) we went back to survey the damage. Our background robot head looked like a balloon. So we drew in a string. Mud and tire tracks add to the damage.

Wayne gets a poke from the shadow of iRoboti.

And then it was done. All that was left.

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