Hello Reader,
As a follow-up to the blog post I made to the one last week (Here’s the link) in case you didn’t read it), in this post I’ll tell you guys about what happened at the Youth Arts Festival.
Not to be dishonest, but I was a bit nervous before the festival. It was my first time being a professional live portrait artist. Of course, there were those times I sat and offered to paint people’s portraits for a small fee in my local Starbucks, but that never amounted to much.
When I got there, it was fairly organized, us live artists got our own section to set up in. There was another artist there named Ryan Barnes, he was cool, you should check him out, here’s a link to his website. There was another artist who was going to set up next to us, but he arrived late, so me, Ryan, and the artist’s brother had to set up the artist’s station ourselves. As I was getting ready to start painting, I realized I had accidentally left my beloved palette knife at home. I knew this would probably mess with my painting technique, but I tried to not let it faze me.
A Photo of my table at the festival:
As the event started, I thought I would work on a painting of a photo until someone came to get their portrait painted. But almost immediately, a mother with an infant child came up to ask me about my work. When I told her, she asked how long it would take to make a portrait of her child. I told her it would take me roughly an hour to paint their portrait, but I could make a pencil sketch of it in about 30 minutes. She asked me to do the ladder. In the end, most people who came up to me, all of whom turned out to be young children, wanted their portraits drawn instead of painted. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little disheartened that I spent all that time practicing painting quickly, only for not that many people to want them… Nevertheless, I had fun making art of so many people, and still got to paint a few portraits.
Artboard from the Festival:
Speaking of other people, I’m proud to say that I set up another artboard at this festival! In fact, I should say this artboard turned out to be even more popular than the last one. Kids loved expressing themselves on it, and some adults even joined in, which was splendid to see.
Overall, I had fun with this festival. Even though I was pretty nervous about it in the weeks leading up to the festival. I met some nice people, brought some kids a lot of joy with my work, and got a lot of people to engage in art. I hope I get to do more things like it in the future.
Here are all the photos I took of portraits I made at the festival; I didn’t capture all of them:
Thanks for reading this blog post.
From,
Kekoa Paki
Kekoa Paki Arts 
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