Street Painting!

     One of Drake’s richest traditions, street painting on Carpenter Avenue in between Cowles Library and Jewett Hall took place this past Friday, and it was a blast! If you’re not familiar with street painting, it’s a kick off to the Drake Relays festivities when 54 different student organizations/clubs create a design to reflect their group’s characteristics and uniqueness and the Relays theme. This year’s theme is “Memories in Motion”.
    This was my second year street painting, and this year I even created the Chemistry Club’s square design with my friend and former cross country teammate, Josh (He’s also my VP in Chem. Club). We both consider ourselves to be artistically challenged, but we were both pleased with the output of our work. This year there were actually more designs submitted than squares available, so we felt relieved that our design was selected!
    We decided to make molecules that were running, and dub our theme “Molecules in Motion”. We had to throw the blue oval on their too!
    Overall, there are three stages to street painting:
1.    Background Painting – our color was yellow this year
2.    Sketching – clubs sketch their designs using chalk to prepare for the actual painting
3.    Street Painting! – This when most of the work is actually done. Three hours are allotted for each club to complete their square, and at the end of the night, a winner is selected based on their creativity and how well their square reflects the theme. After clubs have finished painting (or before for that matter too) pain flies everywhere. It’s impossible to leave the street without being fully covered in paint!

Drake has a lot of talented artists! I think it’s safe to say that the Chemistry Club didn’t come close to winning the contest, but I’d give us an ‘A’ for execution! A lot of the designs are very complex, and some clubs took all three hours to finish their design. Walking up and down the street at the end of the night, I was thoroughly impressed. Each square was individually unique and beautiful in its own sense.
One of my favorite designs was actually a collaboration between five organizations: The five clubs teamed up to paint the Earths across all five squares, while adding their own character in other areas of the square at the same time. It’s really cool.
    After washing all of the paint out my hair, I’m really looking forward to this upcoming week. It’ll be full of excitement and track races, and I look forward to cheering on my teammates (and some of my high school teammates) in the relays, and look forward to running a competitive 8k in the “Relays on the Roads” race on Saturday morning! It’s going to be a great week! Check out pictures of our design and some of the square below!

Phase 1: Background Painting

Phase 2: Sketching (hard to see due to the contrast and sunlight)

Phase 3: Street Painting

Molecules in Motion!

The Blue Oval (I painted the blue!)

Not too shabby, looks like we planned!

Josh and I

The cool multi-organization collaboration

The 2012 Campus Fellowship Square! It turned out well! So much detail, I really like how they captured some of the main events we do throughout the year.

V-day!