Chance Encounters

The master of contemporary sidewalk chalk shares his latest creations in this collection of impossible-seeming, brilliantly imagined illustrations that leap off the page in all their original joyful exuberance.

David Zinn's amazing street drawings are created using chalk, charcoal and found objects, and each extraordinary drawing is only ever temporary. This book preserves Zinn's art in all its colorful, hypnotic glory by collecting together never-before-published images of his eye-popping creations.

Created over the last two years on streets across the globe, these adorably zany and deceptively three-dimensional characters come to life on manhole covers and streetlamps, village squares and subway platforms. Zinn's most frequent characters are a bright green googly-eyed monster and a phlegmatic flying pig--but the diversity of his menagerie is limited only by the size of the sidewalk and the spirit of the day.

In a brief introduction Zinn describes his creative process, explaining how he seeks out everyday imperfections to situate his art-such as sidewalk cracks and chips, tufts of weeds and sewer grates-and brief captions describe the provenance of each work. While these amazing drawings can no longer stop pedestrians in their tracks on the streets, they live on in book form to mesmerize and inspire readers of all ages.

About the Author

David Zinn was a freelance commercial illustrator for more than twenty years until he picked out some sidewalk chalk to "work" outdoors on a beautiful day. Since then his work has appeared on streets around the United States and as far away as Taiwan, Sweden, Germany, France and Holland. He is the author of Temporary Preserves and Underfoot Menagerie and has been featured in The Guardian, Business Insider, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Zinn lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.