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.

This year all three girls drew their own entry in the competition. Ava created a sweet Candy Land illustration with a popsicle, candy cane, lollipop and wrapped candy. Lola drew Unicorn Land with colorful unicorns and flying unicorns. Mathilde drew an under water scene with jellyfish, colorful sharks and a coral reef. As she finished her drawing much faster than the older girls (and because there was more space) she later added an above the water scene with birds, an island, rain clouds and a rainbow.

As always there was a lot of chalk mess made by the girls. But that's half the fun, right? Ava and Lola both wore disposable gloves in an attempt to keep their hands clean, but as Lola discovered that wasn't so successful! Mathilde struggled with the adult sized gloves and just went without which resulted in chalk covered hands and face.

Once the girls were done with their artwork we decided to go and squeeze in one chocolate treat from the festival. They had all remembered the deliciously thick Oreo milk shakes from Barney's so we headed straight there for another hit. They were so good!

We then checked out the other artworks on display. As always there was a pretty big mix of art, both in the level of skill and the topics. There were quite a few candy and chocolate related entries, a lot of unicorns, lots of landscapes, and (being Berkeley) the odd political statement or two. Here's a look at some of our favorites. Make sure to scroll down to see this year's winner.

This next one was my absolute favorite (apart from my girls' drawings, of course) and I was happy to learn today that it was the overall winner.

There's not a kids' category for the Chalk Art Festival (although this is something I suggest every year) but Ava's Candy Land artwork did receive an honorable mention this year.

Does your home town have any fun art festivals like this? My girls love taking part in the Chocolate & Chalk Art Festival, and the best part is that they get to see their artwork on display for weeks, or even months if it doesn't get walked on too much.