This ‘Winter Illuminations’ light festival is being held in the botanical gardens of Nabana no Sato, on the island of Nagashima in Kuwana, Japan. Hailed as the biggest annual light show in the country, over 7 million LED lights are switched on every evening at nightfall, to reveal a truly amazing spectacle of walkways, tunnels, floating lights and beautiful scenes such as Mount Fuji at dawn.

The theme of the festival this year is ‘nature’ – each LED light within the tunnels are encased in cherry blossom style petals and the great pond within the gardens is laden with a river of lights. Every flower in the garden has a light – not only this but they all change colour throughout the night.

The Winter Illuminations festival runs until the 31st March and is an annual event within Japan, as well as many other areas of the country celebrating light in all it’s glory. We like it a lot.

Winter Illuminations: Photos

The Pow Wow street art festival in Hawaii is in its third year running, and with Pow Wow #3 just gone, we’re here to check out whats been happening in the sunshine. In a festival built upon art, collaboration and the broader community; Pow Wow invites internationally known contemporary artists to paint the town red… And green, and blue, and pink, and yellow and, you get the picture.

Locals and street art lovers from afar congregate, to experience a unique insight into the process involved in making the work. From start to finish, the artists have an audience. In most instances we will only see art when it is at its final stage: ready to present – in a frame, on a wall, in a gallery and so on. A great deal can be seen in the process and techniques that go into the work – any artists out there will know exactly what I’m talking about!

“One unique aspect of Pow Wow is collaboration,” said co-founder Kamea Hadar. “You’ll have five artists working on one wall. … The artists create something as a whole.”

This year, Pow Wow has got big, with over 100 local and international artists involved. Returning international artists include Suitman (Hong Kong), Meggs, Rone and Phibs (Australia) and Peap Tarr (Cambodia). Returning local artists include Prime, Ckaweeks, Solomon Enos, Angry Woebots and Ekundayo.

Not only has Pow Wow brought art and creativity to the town of Kaka’ako, it has also done wonders for the community. Here at Endoftheline we are impressed by the welcoming nature the surrounding area has offered in response to Pow Wow. The state, private landowners, locals and businesses have all embraced the project – some allowing the use of their walls for painting. Overall, the ‘street art festival’ is growing – let’s hope we see these popping up all over the place!

Visiting artist: Rone (Melbourne)

Visiting artist: Askew (New Zealand)

Visiting artist: Sam Rodriguez (San Jose)

Local artist Kamea Hadar (Hawaii) and Rone (New Zealand)

Os Gemeos & Aryz make a statement with this monumental mural as part of the Urban Forms Festival in Poland.

Photos taken from Urban Forms 

This year we joined Urban In Ibiza for their annual paint in the sun.  We joined a whole load of people painting including the ever fresh Inkie, Cept, Finbarr, Pure Evil and some other people we are too drunk to remember.  Dizzi and the team smashed out a blistering show in the baking Ibiza Heat.  While we melted the party kicked into gear and the celebrities crawled out of their villas to make play in the gardens of Atzaro, a swanky Spa in the middle of the country.  We retired completely drunk and exhausted and got on with a relaxing holiday in the Island that never sleeps.   Nobody really wants to see our holiday photos but we have posted a selection to show that we really where there..

We finished the enormous gaucho at the Meeting of Styles and went looking for another wall.  We stopped by the MOS spot to see what was going down and marvelled at this incredible mother and son by Pesimo – incredible styles and great execution.  The whole place had over flowed with colour since we had left early the night before to find a steak dinner.

We had heard Vhils was doing something far away from the MOS spot and thought we should give it a look.  We thought we were lost as we walked down this enormous boulevard but we kept on in the sweltering heat.  We spotted Lilliween up a ladder and Peruvian Jade Rivera painting next to her.underneath a huge cast iron bridge.  As we rounded the corner an enormous Skeletor greeted us and shit a brick when we realised the scale of the wall Lean Frizzera, Martin Ron and Emy Mariani had painted.  It was enormous…  We had to paint by these guys and scoped out a wall right next to them which was covered in Political slogans and football team propaganda.

We hopped across the street between 12 lanes of traffic all speeding up to catch the lights and found a stash of ladders, paint and emulsion.  We had nearly exhausted our supply and picked up much needed black IronLak and local paint.   We legged it back across the street this time carrying an enormous ladder and set up underneath a crying tree.  This set the tone for a serene and laid back paint next to the busiest street we have ever seen underneath a huge railway bridge in the middle of Avenida Libertador and Doreigo.

This was the most moist we have been painting for a while – the Buenos Aires Crying treee, Fresh Orange Juice, local Churapan from the street vendor and incrediblee humidity made this one sweaty paint – but the people were great and the police even showed up to lend some support..

We finished pretty late and the darkness comes on you quickly in Argentina.  We trusted the final shots to local photographers and got the fuck out – stranger and stranger people were turning up and the busy street became a honking noisy smelly polluted gridlocked mess.  The fun was over time to get out of dodge.  We hopped in a taxi and headed to a wall some new friends were painting around the corner and got thoroughly blazed and drunk on the local 40oz beer and strange bush weed..  All the pictures from this point on were very wobbly..  anyway here is the results…

The final part of holiday was a painting trip to the barrio of San Telmo. Whilst Jim Vision was painting up a burnt out car we noticed the beautiful but neglected wall of what looked like an abandoned building.  We quickly covered the wall with blue and white and it was only once most of the wall had been covered in paint that the owner of the building rounded the corner to see Jim mid-throw with a bucket of emulsion.

He was an angry man, and the lack of communication was making him go blue in the face,  needing a cigarette to calm his shaking nerves  luckily a local photographer pointed out how much better this was than the tags and butterflies that had previously occupied the wall.  After much discussion in languages unknown he came round to the idea and let us finish.  If only it was that simple here. Probs painted Marvel characters Daredevil and Elektra on this wall to complete an incredible day of painting.  We can’t say enough good things about Argentina and the wonderful people we met.  Thank you Mateus for taking so many great shots of the walls and convincing the locals to give us a break.

The next part of our South American adventure saw Probs painting with two of our favourite local artists – Bater, Riccy Riccardo, Emy Mariani, Martin Ron and Lean Frizzera. We’d come across the wall they were painting for Meeting of Styles that included a big Skeletor (from a cartoon called He Man, for those too young to remember) so we knew they were on our wavelength and when they saw Probs’ rendering of Princess Amidala (from the new Star Wars movies, for those too old to have watched them) they felt the same.

After the language barriers had been transcended with gifts of beer and an exchange of email addresses, we met up again a couple of days later to produce a Thundercats themed production at a big wall at the end of the train line called Los Incas.  We just happened to have a sketch by comic supremo Francisco Herrera in our bag of Lion-o and the Mutants. The result is definitely one of the highlights of the trip. As always we’ll let the pictures do the talking at this point. Let us know what you think in the comments section and watch the the new manga style Thundercats series, it’s fantastic!