Creating artwork can be a messy job.

Ask Lauren Johnson. The 18-year-old graduate of Tacoma School for the Arts was working on a 5-by-7-foot replica of a painting by Leonid Afremov. Except this rendition wasn’t oil on canvas; it was chalk on sidewalk.

Johnson used only 12 chalk sticks, but from those she created numerous hues of colors, including the striking oranges and deep blues that dominate “Alley by the Lake.”

She was only about a fourth of the way through finishing her work early Friday afternoon, but chalk dust completely covered her hands, arms, shirt and jeans.

“You kind of get it everywhere,” she said. “But it’s just part of using chalk. I don’t really mind it.”

Johnson was one of dozens recreating paintings on the sidewalks that line Tollefson Plaza and the campus of nearby University of Washington Tacoma during the two-day Showcase Tacoma festival. Hundreds of others browsed the paintings and took in the objets d’art for sale before rain later in the afternoon drove many of them away.

One of Johnson’s classmates from SOTA, 18-year-old Katie Gregory of University Place, was chalking a rendition of Salvador Dali’s “The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition.” The Spaniard’s artwork might have survived decades of critical study by thousands of stuffy art professors, but Johnson’s recreation of the painting didn’t last through Saturday morning.

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