Foothill students, sprawling across the halls with chalk-stained hands and imaginative minds, showed their creative sides as they crafted chalk masterpieces for the annual Chalk Festival. The festival was held on April 29 and 30, allowing for all participating students to take two days off from classes and participate in collaborative art.

Giovanna Postma ‘21 felt that the festival had “a very creative feel.” She enjoyed participating because “art is a really good escape for [her].”

“With the chalk festival, you’re hanging out with your friends and collectively doing a piece. It’s a very nice sense of togetherness,” she explained. “Art is such a great program. It’s such a great thing, you can really just express yourself and embrace creativity and really just do whatever you want. It’s one of my favorite classes, so this is the best part of this week for me.”

Overall, there was much diversity in the types of pieces being created by students. Some were of people, others were images of animals and some, like Hailey Villano ‘19’s, were more on the abstract side.

“I am making a toucan that is sitting on a record player that is playing an orange,” Villano said. “It’s also floating in the sky.”

Villano enjoyed the fact that students were able to sit outside of class during school and spend time just doing art. According to her, the chalk festival allows for an “expression of creativity,” and provides for an opportunity for the school to “show its different sides.”

Kadyn Terry ‘21, whose group created two pieces, decided to create “Sasha, […] a tiger on some rocks with a tree in the back. It’s Asian art that [they] found.”

Terry expressed that she really liked the chalk festival because her group had a lot more bonding time.

“It was fun to go around and see other people’s art because I didn’t realize how talented so many of my classmates were,” she said.

On the second day of the chalk festival, however, the skies turned a more ominous gray, and as the rain began to drizzle, students hurriedly moved their large canvases under the eaves of buildings and into the pods to proceed with their creations.

“On Monday it was supposed to rain, and it wasn’t supposed to rain today, but we got rained out,” says art teacher and chalk festival organizer Justin Frazier.

However, the rain was not the only hardship faced by this year’s chalk festival—Advanced Placement (AP) tests are looming right around the corner.

Despite these complications, Frazier was glad that students were still able to create their unique pieces of art that will be showcased to the school.

“It’s still about being out there and just seeing people work large and colorful,” he said. “There’s an excitement to it that doesn’t happen every day in the classroom.”