How one 14-year-old is helping her younger brother travel the world through chalk
06 September, 2020
As the coronavirus pandemic has taken numerous travel plans and adventures to a standstill, it hasn’t stopped Macaire Everett, 14, from helping her younger brother start to see the world.
Everett has spent recent months recreating global landmarks with chalk on the driveway of her home in Libertyville, Illinois, creating postcard-perfect scenes on her behalf little brother to step into.
In one of Everett’s sidewalk chalk drawings, Camden, 9 - wearing a striped shirt with a red kerchief tied around his neck - sometimes appears on a gondola, steering the chalk-drawn vessel through the winding canals of Venice.
A different one of Everett’s creations shows the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as her brother adopts the classic tourist pose, trying to push the tilted structure upright.
During an interview with Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest on the pair’s TV show Live with Kelly and Ryan, the siblings explained how the concept for the chalk art had become.
“It was virtually out of boredom,” Everett said. “We really didn’t have anything to accomplish and this started during spring break, whenever we couldn’t travel. We were really bummed out about this. So we went outside, grabbed some chalk and started doing chalk art and posting them [online].”
After some encouragement from friends and neighbours, Everett set a goal to create a new chalk art each day for 100 days. She said neither her or her younger brother have ever travelled beyond the united states and the chalk art was inspired by “all the places we want to go”.
Though 100 days have finally passed since the two began their chalk art adventures, the siblings are continuing the project after being encouraged by their growing Instagram following.
“Now we’re getting each one of these requests from people, talking about how precisely they want us to go to their country through the chalk because nobody else can travel either,” she said.
Everett has created a lot more than 120 chalk landscapes, taking her and Camden everywhere from the fantastic Wall of China to the Pyramids of Giza. In another of the chalk scenes, Camden poses next to the Moai at Easter Island with his toy bunny. In another, he's driving a jet ski in Toronto.
Yet, his favourite, he told Seacrest and Ripa, sees him swap the role of tourist to use it hero in a Mission Impossible-inspired scene where he dangles from the edge of a cliff as he tries to attain a helicopter to escape.
The pictures of the chalk art, Everett said, are all taken by her father, who manages to fully capture a bird's eye view of the scenes with the aid of a drone.
“He’s also responsible for power-washing the driveway after each single art,” Everett said.
In the event of rain, the siblings take their project to the basement of their house.
“My dad prepared an area,” Everett said. “It’s just a concrete floor in his workshop where I could work when it rains. We then have a picture using the ladder inside.”
Everett said she isn’t sure where her artistic sensibility originated from as no person in her family is an artist. She began “with some really simple drawings," she said. "But looking back, if you take action for 100 days, you really improve and learn."
Source: www.thenational.ae