Another excellent piece of art from the 2013 Denver Chalk Art Festival:
It’s a chalk interpretation of “Steamnocchio” by Fabricio Moraes — his award-winning 3D CG steampunk adaptation of the Pinocchio story. Â Check out Fabricio’s other work, too — he does some great stuff!
The Denver Chalk Art Festival is always a colorful (if crowded) experience for photographers.  This year, it happened to coincide with the Denver Comic Con — so it was fitting that the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design (RMCAD) contributed this work based on cartoon / sci-fi characters:
One of the hallmarks of RMCAD art works is their use of reflectors to turn a curved artwork into something that is visually straight when seen from just the right angle. Â If you look carefully, you can see the bottom edge of their reflector in the top third of the above image.
Seen on the beach at Ha’ena State Park; Kauai, Hawaii:
I’ll freely admit that I posed my model in this shot — we found it laying in the sand a few feet away from where I took this shot. Â I thought it’d make an interesting composition, so moved it over to this one little footprint-free patch of sand and waited for the sun to peek out through the overcast. Â I love the look of a “castaway” coconut, trying to make a life in its new home. Â I’m still debating whether I shouldn’t have brushed the sand off the coconut husk, though…
In spite of fitful weather, we headed downtown yesterday for the 2012 Denver Chalk Art Festival. This was one of our favorites (reminds me of our kiddo’s response to a camera):
Normally the weather’s pretty cooperative by this time of year — it’s generally hot, but dry. This year, for some reason, we’ve had alternating hot & dry / cool & wet weather for the past few weeks. Saturday night, we got nailed by some fast-moving thunderstorms.
So most of the chalk artists lost Saturday’s work (in full or in part), and had to do major repairs on Sunday. Pretty impressive for a day’s work, I’d say…
Another shot from the incomparable Filoli Gardens in the San Francisco bay area:
I don’t know just who left the blooms in the birdbath, but it was a nice touch. On a rainy day, it was a welcome spot of color in the shade…
As the saying goes, if you’re looking for a photographic subject, and don’t see anything in your surroundings — look up / look down!
This is a shot of a chandelier in a ballroom at Filoli Gardens south of San Francisco. I didn’t *quite* get things centered (I was in a crowd, so couldn’t do my usual stunt of laying on the floor for this shot), but I still like the symmetry…
I stumbled across this in a shop at San Francisco’s Ferry Building:
OK, the string is actually on a price tag — I just thought that from this angle, it looked as through the wooden hand had tied it on as a reminder of something.
If you’re about ready for a little break from all things Maya, here’s a shot from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science — it’s of a miniature carving (roughly 10″ tall) by Vasily Konovalenko titled “Painter:”
If you’re wondering why miniature sculpture is in a natural history museum, it’s because Konovalenko’s carvings are entirely made from gemstones. Here’s this little guy’s bill of materials from the placard:
Shoes: black jasper
Pants: jasper
Shirt: lapis
Apron: white jasper
Hat: jasper
Face & Hands: jasper
Eyes: sapphire
Floor: agate
Bucket: petrified wood, cacholong
Brush: agate, amethyst quartz
Seen at the 2012 National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:
On a trip through Glacier National Park, we ran across a stack of small thin rocks that someone had made near one of the visitors’ centers:
Maybe it was built on a lark by one person, maybe it was the product of many individuals as they passed through. Just the same, it was a nice bit of whimsy to find in the middle of a long road trip…