Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Gateway Chalk Art Festival 2014

Chalk art festival number four happened for me this past weekend and I think it was my favorite image that I've done so far. It was also my last chalk art festival before Scott and I will be moving. 
 
There were three of us that worked on the image together as a team. Last year we did a Michael Jackson image but it rained and ruined our work, so we never fully finished it.
But we wanted to do something with a lot of color, something interesting that wouldn't be everywhere else. (Frozen movie characters were immediately thrown off the list of options. Way too popular.)
This was the oil painting I found that we decided to do. 


 Normally I like to prepare for the festivals by sketching out the image on paper using the grid and then when the time gets closer, rough sketching the full size we're going to do on sidewalk. But this was the first time that I never sketched out on paper, on sidewalk or anything before the festival. So I was not feeling great about it. Combine with the absurd amount of things going on in mine and Scott's life the past couple months... means I was at times regretting even signing up for the festival. I just didn't feel like I had enough time for everything and I was getting stressed out! 


 Starting the image was hard. It was hard to figure out how to make an oil painting work with chalk and a sidewalk. We were kicking ourselves in the pants for picking this image at first. But as the hours went by we finally figured out how to make it work.

Meet Amber. She is the messiest chalker I know. :)
 


Meet KaLee. She is a perfectionist and made our image perfect. Amber and I made her do that hard parts that we didn't want to even attempt. (Like the gondalas.... geesh hard.)


 We chalked for 7 hours Friday evening, ending at 9:00 pm. It started to get really windy so we taped a tarp down around our image and called it quits for the night. There is where we ended...


 It ended up only taking us 4 hours to finish the image the next morning. I thought for sure it would take longer but we got rolling along! 


 The image was 8ft tall and 6 ft wide. I have no idea if we won any of the contests. We didn't stay long enough to find out. But that's okay because I never do these for the contests. It's fun being in the environment of all these great chalkers around you, creating beautiful images. You get sucked into your own work and don't realize you've been on the ground as long as you have. I love chalking as a group. My first chalk art I did by myself and it was fun and rewarding, but I couldn't even attempt these larger scale, and more difficult images that we've done as a group. Plus it's just fun to spend so much time with your friends creating something.


Here are some of the other images that were done that I thought were picture worthy!










The End!

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Thesis Defeated

Scott sent me this photo yesterday...


YAY!!! He has officially and successfully defended and conquered his thesis for his Masters in Geology! 
I'm a very proud and happy wife.
Yay for freedom and no more school stress!
Woot! Woot!

Thursday, June 12, 2014

A Trip To See Our Future

Where: Covington, Louisiana 
Duration: Unknown, somewhere around 3-5 years
Reason: Scott has a job with Chevron!
When: July 22nd, the long drive begins!
 
The flight left Friday evening. We were finally going to see what our next few years of life would look like! By the time we were flying over New Orleans the sun had gone down and all you could see were patches of city lights grouped together. You could see a river running through the city, it's edges lined with lights. As we descended the windows started to get foggy and I knew we were in the right place... humidity.
 

The humidity slaps you across the face over there. It was 10:00 at night when we landed and it was still so hot and wet. I could feel my poor, dry, Utah skin just soaking up the moisture.
 
Our hotel was right on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. The view was insane looking out at this huge lake with a road going across looking like it leads to nowhere. It takes a half hour to drive across and all the while you feel like you're driving in the middle of the ocean, you can't see any land going towards Covington! It is also the longest continuous bridge over water.



 
I loved driving around Covington. It made me think of the time I visited my cousin in Georgia when I was young. There are so many trees, big trees. And they line the edges of the roads. I liked the feel of Covington. It's more just a small town, away from the tourists and questionable items that you come across in New Orleans.



We started off our morning looking at the two apartments that we had narrowed our search down to. It took less time then I thought and was an easy choice! You turn off the main road, and the street stops at the apartments where they are back and tucked away in the trees. Scott will have at most an eight minute commute to work and there's a sports medicine office two minutes up the street if I can get hired there!
 
After finding our apartment we wanted to go explore New Orleans a little more. We were told that there was some stuff to see and good places to eat in French Quarters so that's where we headed. We found Bourbon Street. (You can't miss it. The smell is a dead give away along with the never ending rows of bars and loud music.) It's a gross street. I'm okay to never walk down it again. 


There were other streets in the French Quarters that weren't as bad. They were even quaint. We found a jazzy band playing out on a bench in the sun, sweating like crazy as they played. There were voodoo shops and lots of artwork displayed around a park. Past the park you can walk up to the Mississippi River and most likely see some steam boats.



 We decided to head back over to Covington for dinner that night. (We had seen enough of New Orleans for the moment and we did not want to get stuck down at the French Quarters at night.) We ate at Morton's Seafood Restaurant. It sits on the edge of Tchefuncte River. (I have no idea how to actually say that...) 



The food was pretty good. We weren't expecting our seafood platter of soft shell crab, shrimp, oysters, and catfish to all be breaded and deep fried, so that was interesting!



 Our flight back home was early the next morning, so it was just a small little trip. But I'm so glad we were able to go out there and see the area and find a place to live. I'm excited to move and I'm glad we're on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. :)