Berkeley Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival 2018

This past weekend saw one of our favorite local festivals here in Berkeley, the annual Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival.

Now, you would think that the chocolate part of the festival would be what excites my kids every year, but the chalk art part of the day is actually the big draw card for them. It's not every day you get to get creative on the sidewalk, after all. Plus, it's a competition with prizes up for offer.

This year's festival happened to fall the day after we arrived home from our East Coast trip. I'll be sharing our East Coast trip here soon, but make sure to check out Instagram in the mean time as I've been sharing sneak peeks there. Anyway, we were all a little tired from our early flight home from Boston so we had a quiet morning and headed to the festival in the afternoon. This didn't give us an awful lot of time to try out the chocolate on offer but we still had plenty of time for the girls to get creative with chalk.

We found ourselves a few clean-ish squares of sidewalk along Shattuck Avenue in the Gourmet Ghetto and the girls got to work.

Berkeley Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival 2017

About a month back the girls took part in one of our favorite local festivals, the Berkeley Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival! This festival was previously held annually, but has been away for the past few years (it clashed with the Bay Area Book Festival which was run by the same people). The girls and I were super excited that it has made a come back and we hope that it's here to stay.

Berkeley Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival 2014

UPDATE: Ava's artwork received an honorable mention from the judges! Go Ava!

Yesterday the 18th Annual Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival was held in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto neighbourhood. Every year around the start of June Shattuck Ave becomes alive with colour as festival goers decorate the sidewalks with chalk artworks.  

Like last year Ava was excited to take part and couldn't wait to get started creating her chalk art master piece on the sidewalk. This time Ava worked out in advance what she would like to draw: a mermaid and various aquatic creatures swimming in the sea. Lola was also keen to take part and decided that she would draw a rainbow and a ring. Or, as it turned out, get Daddy to draw a rainbow and a ring!

Berkeley Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival

Today the sidewalks of Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto came alive with colour.

This weekend marked the 17th Annual Berkeley Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival.

Participants are invited to take part in decorating the sidewalks with chalk art as part of a competition. Entry to the competition is free and participants are assigned spaces along the sidewalk. It's all pretty flexible and as long as the spot is available participants can choose where they'd like their assigned space to be. 

Ava staked out a particularly shady spot under a tree near the start of the festival and set about creating her music inspired masterpiece. It's in front of 1625 Shattuck Avenue if you're interested. We were not sure beforehand what Ava was going to draw. In fact, I don't think she knew until she started! She had originally joked that she was going to draw a T-Rex biting someone's head off - lovely! I was a little worried that she'd settled on this idea however after a little staring at her blank canvas she started drawing a guitar. Much more civilised.

Ava's chalk masterpiece