New ‘Peanuts’ artwork comes alive in 3-D outside Santa Rosa ice arena

Late “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz surely would be tickled by a piece of optical-illusion art that enlivens a walkway outside of his family’s Santa Rosa ice-skating rink.

The 3-D piece makes several of Schulz’s most beloved characters appear to be absolutely upstanding.

A son of the world’s best-known cartoonist, Santa Rosa resident Craig Schulz, was behind the placement of the artwork, a re-creation of a piece located at Universal Studios in Japan, where Snoopy and his pals are a very big deal.

Like the artwork in Japan, the large piece of sticker art newly applied on concrete outside the Redwood Empire Ice Arena/Snoopy’s Home Ice near Coddingtown Mall is a take-off on the cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.

Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Marcie are portrayed walking single-file across the white, parallel bars of a crosswalk.

Viewed from either side or from behind, the characters appear bizarrely distorted. Charlie Brown, Lucy and Marcie all are about 16 feet tall and their heads are abnormally huge, easily twice as long as their bodies.

The magic happens when a viewer stands on a marker in front of the crosswalk. From that vantage point, the characters look to be perfectly proportioned - and it appears for all the world that they’re not lying flat on the concrete, but are standing.

It’s irresistible fun to have someone snap a photo as you stand on the crosswalk and extend a flattened hand at just the right distance off the ground for it to appear that it’s patting Snoopy’s head.

Craig Schulz, a pilot and a partner in the ice rink his late father and his mother built in 1969, has wanted for years to create in Santa Rosa a duplicate of the 3-D crosswalk art that delights visitors to the Universal Studios theme park in Osaka.

He found some free time following the completion late in 2015 of the 3-D “The Peanuts Movie,” which he wrote with his son, Bryan Schulz, and Cornelius Uliano.

Using Photoshop editing software, Schulz tried for a while to reproduce the crosswalk art himself.

“I could never figure it out,” he said.

Ultimately he requested and received from the graphics people at Universal Studios in Japan a computer file containing the image of the original crosswalk artwork.

Aaron Friedman and his staff at Signarama of Santa Rosa devised a way to print the ‘Peanuts’ images on great sheets of a durable sticker material.

Quite pleased with how the piece turned out, Craig Schulz has learned through experimentation the optimal time of day to view and photograph the playful, artistic illusion: it’s between about 2 and 5 p.m.

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.