Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - The city's Municipal Plaza played host to the IX Puerto Vallarta I Madonnari "street painters" festival last weekend. This event featured some incredibly talented artists, who used the pavement in the square in front of the municipal building as their canvas and chalk as their medium.

According to the co-founder of the event, Kathy Koury, almost 100 participants registered for the chalk art festival's 9th edition in Puerto Vallarta, which is a sister event to the i Madonnari Festival that's held in Santa Barbara, California every year.

Photo credit: Gary Lichtenstein

At this year's event in Puerto Vallarta, there were 45 registered adult artists, mainly from the Banderas Bay area, but also some artists from the U.S., Guadalajara, Monterrey, Colima, and Guanajuato. There were 40 children registered in the 5-12 year-old's competition, and 13 in the teen category.

After three days of hard work on the part of the participants, including dealing with Friday night's rain on the second day, the ninth edition of this colorful festival ended on Sunday, Nov 9, with awards given in the adults, teenagers and children's categories.

The judges' decisions were based on the drawing's concept, and the artists' skills, gis management (relationships, patterns, and trends), and techniques.

The winners in the various categories were:

Children (under 12 years)
First Place: Andrew Chávez Cuervo
Honorable Mention: Axel Chavez Cuervo

Youth (13 and older)
First Place: Raúl Hernández Galeana's "peacock"
Honorable Mention: Romina Maria Harris and Laura Alancastro.

Adults
First Place: Santiago Hernández Pacheco's "3D mechanical hand"
Second: Hiram Armando Villaseñor Garcia's "turtle"
Third: Eric Alberto Lopez Montanez's "autistic nephew"
Fourth: "Quetzal kings"
Fifth: Francisco Antonio Lopez Arechiga.

First prize in the adult category was airfare and accommodation for the artist to represent Puerto Vallarta in the 2015 Santa Barbara I Madonnari festival. First prize in the teen category was $1000 pesos in cash and the winner of the children's category won $500 mn.

The awards ceremony concluded another fun and colorful I Madonnari festival in Vallarta, which was made possible by the support of event sponsors; the Santa Barbara/Puerto Vallarta Sister Cities Committee; event organizers María Laurel Carrillo, Javier Niño, and Rubén Cham; and many other contributors - but above all by the artists who gave life to this event.

Click HERE to see some of the best drawings by various local, national and international artists during the IX Festival I Madonnari Puerto Vallarta 2014.

The Santa Barbara festival, the first of its kind in North America, celebrated its 28th anniversary in 2014, featured 150 artists and had over 20,000 visitors according to Kathy, who attends the Puerto Vallarta event annually. To contact Kathy for participation next year, email her at ccp(at)sbceo.org.

The Art Director of the Marta Gilbert and La Cuiza Concepto art galleries, Rubén Cham, and the Publisher and Editor of GAYPV Magazine, Tim Wilson, contributed to this article.