Hey everyone… I’ll be attending the New York Anime Festival this weekend, and over the course of the entire show I’ll be on the floor of the Javitz Center in Manhattan creating a giant chalk mural of art from the Anime Soul Eater. I am being brought by FUNimation, and will actually be set up right near their booth in the front of the hall.

I expect the finished mural to take around 25 hours to complete from start to finish, but I’ve gotten a jump start on that by finishing the sketch just the other night. I have provided a photo of the sketch taken as it filled my dining room floor, this part of the mural alone took about 6 hours to complete. I really look forward to seeing everyone at the show, and on Sunday at 1 PM there will be a photo opp of everyone at the show in Soul Eater cosplay as they pose with my mural, and voice actors from the Soul Eater cast. It is going to be a great weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone there. Be sure to stop back to my blog next week when I’ll have progress and finished art photos, as well as costume shots and some images from around the convention.

<<UPDATE!!!!>>

So I have returned from a successful, but KILLER weekend at the New York Anime Festival. For everyone who stopped out at the show I want to say thanks for all of the interest, support and positive feedback. I can only say that I am glad the piece was such a hit, and hope it lived up to the expectations of all you Soul Eater fans out there. It was a very difficult piece to compete for reasons that I still can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe that is because I worked my fingers until they literally bled at the end of the show on Sunday and it is too painful to put my fingers on anything at the moment! (Typing this hurts quite a bit.)

I was able to complete the work about 15 minutes before the 1 PM Sunday photo shoot deadline so my timing could not have been better, but I under-estimated how long it would take. The finished mural actually took around 31.5 hours from the start of the sketch to the moment I signed the piece, well over my 25 hour estimate I originally wrote above. Still, I stayed late into the evenings and got to the show as early as I could (we’re talking 6:30 am on Sunday kind of early) to make sure the work got done.

I want to send out a BIG thanks to FUNimation for giving me the opportunity to create art at this venue and for providing me with such wonderful source material to work from. The mural is currently on it’s way to their offices, I can only hope it arrives without too much damage or smudging. I also want to thank Reed Exhibitions, the folks who put on the New York Anime Festival and who have been having me as a chalk artist at their shows for nearly three years, they always make sure a great time is had by everyone there, fans and exhibitors alike. I also want to thank my ever present assistant Kelly for helping me through yet another very long weekend, she has attended so many shows with me I think I’ve lost count. Special thanks go out to my 2nd assistant this time around, my girlfriend Mary who attended her first official anime convention! I am grateful to everyone for showing her what a wonderfully strange time it can be.

Here are the progress shots and photos of the completed chalk art mural. And for those of you who like things by the numbers they are: 31.5 hours to make, 108 square feet of paper used, 12 characters (the most in any one mural I have made) 356 miles round trip, 2 bloody fingers, 1 very sore back, and 218 photos on my digital camera of which I chose a few to show. Enjoy!