Even if youve never seen pavement chalk art in real life chances are youve seen some of the stunning pho-tos circulating the Internet by renowned pavement artists such as Kurt Wenner or Julian Beever Since side-walk chalk drawings get washed away in the rain or worn away by time photo-graphs provide an excellent way of preserving the art for all to enjoy

Sidewalk chalk drawing is also commonly referred to as pavement art side-walk art street painting 3-D chalk art 3-D pavement art or anamorphic street painting among other terms

Although some artists might use chalk or paint to create these drawings most chalk artists use professional-quality pastels that allow for bright col-ors in a range of hues

The wonder of 3-D sidewalk chalk drawings is that they can transform a familiar ordinary setting into something fantastical and out of this world A portal is opened and the imagina-tion is unfurled Possibilities abound but the artwork only looks correct when seen from a certain angle

Heres an example Can you tell whats being depicted in the painting below

All information in this handout is copyright protected Permission to use this information was granted by Thaneeya McArdle

wwwArt-is-Funcom on October 13 2012

httpwwwart-is-funcomsidewalk-chalk-drawingshtml

The photo above was taken from the opposite angle that you are supposed to view it Notice how stretched out the shapes are in the foreground

What a remarkable difference it makes when you view the art from the correct angle It actually looks like td there is a giant hole in the pavement filled with terracotta Lego figures

This phenomenon is known as perspectival anamorphosis which means that the artwork will look 3-dimensional when viewed from a specific angle but will appear totally skewed from other angles Anamorphic drawing is another way of describing these types of 3-D pavement drawings

Anamorphosis was a technique discovered in the early Renaissance when artists painted ceilings to depict towering architecture and a floating menagerie of figures some appearing closer and others appearing to be higher up as if they were inhabiting an actual 3-D space Anamorphic perspective flourished well into the Ba-roque and Rococo eras

Optical Illusions in 3D Sidewalk NAME _______________________________________

Lego Army by Leon Keer at the Sarasota Chalk Festival 2011

Some current Sidewalk Artists

Kurt Wenner

Julian Beever

Melanie Stimmel

Julia Kirk-Purcell

Kurt Wenner

Melanie Stimmel

Julian Beever

Julia Kirk-Purcell

Edgar Mueller

Kurt Wenner

Melanie Stimmel

Julian Beever

Julia Kirk-Purcell

Edgar Mueller