David Zinn takes a playful approach to drawing and his work, and the artist has even had his work featured in the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) back in 2018, where he worked on a “path” that went through outdoor spaces, letting the museum visitors explore and wander to discover Zinn’s playful creatures and designs that were scattered around.

Given all of that, Bored Panda reached out to the artist:

"The honest truth about my art is that I am inspired by the absence of perfection as a possibility: between the irregularities of the stained concrete and the limited hours of available daylight outdoors, perfection is blessedly not an option. Instead, there is just the lunatic joy of finding the most satisfying option that exists within those limitations."

For more than twenty years, Zinn freelanced for a wide variety of commercial clients while simultaneously sneaking “pointless” art into the world at large. His professional commissions included theatrical posters, business logos, educational cartoons, landfill murals, environmental superheroes, corporate allegories, and hand-painted dump trucks, and his less practical creations involved bar coasters, restaurant placemats, cake icing, and snow. Now, thanks to the temptations of a box of sidewalk chalk on an unusually sunny day, Mr. Zinn is known all over the world for the art he creates under his feet.

Most of his creatures appear on sidewalks in Michigan, but many have surfaced as far away as subway platforms in Manhattan, village squares in Sweden, and street corners in Taiwan. His most frequent characters are Sluggo (a bright green monster with stalk eyes and irreverent habits) and Philomena (a phlegmatic flying pig), but the diversity of David's work and characters seems to be limited only by the size of the sidewalk and the overall spirit of the day.