Create Your Own Chalkboard Art Like a Pro

Have some sort of chalkboard surface in your home? Does it look terrible because your handwriting looks like chicken scratch? You can easily make it look awesome with some “professional” hand drawn typography.   My chalkboard is in my kitchen so I’ve decided  on a friendly reminder in a chalk font.

First thing’s first: decide on your text.  You can find some great chalkboard fonts through Pinterest or Google.  I used Chalk Hand Lettering and Opera Lyrics Smooth.  You can also hit Pinterest and search for “Chalkboard Typography” for some inspiration.

Next, decide on the size you want you image to be.  I am working with a 20×24 space and I want my typography to almost fill the space.  Open your photo editing software.  I am using Photoshop Elements and Paint.  You could use  only Paint for this and it would work just fine.  Create a new document the size of the space you are working with, in this case 20×24.  You could skip this step, but I don’t want to be limited to 8.5×11 and this step just helps to scale the image on the “canvas”.

Next, create your image/text and scale it to your liking.

Save it and then open it in Paint.

Go to Page Setup and in the Scaling section, click the circle next to “Adjust to” and make sure the text box says “100% normal size”.  The grayed out section below will tell you how much paper to expect to print on.  Two pages by 4 pages was too much for me but I didn’t want to compromise on the size, so I drug the image to the corner as snugly as possible.  I saved one page.  Hooray me.

Make you sure you check your ink output before printing.  I forgot that part.  Sad face.

After you’ve printed the image, trim the margins and tape it all together.  Grab some chalk and a ball point pen.  I used regular chalk as well as a chalk pen from Joann.

Using your chalk, color over the back of the image/text.  This is the same technique I used on my vintage china, only with chalk instead of lead.

Cover it heavily, but try not to stray too far away from the image.  That will create some unwanted smudges on your final product.  Shake the loose chalk from the page.  I wipe my chalkboard down with a wet cloth.  I hear you aren’t supposed to do that, but…  I live on the edge.

Tape ‘er up there and trace the image/text using your ball point pen.  Try not to plant your wrist on the paper while tracing or drag your hand across the paper, that will create smudges.  Remove the paper and, BOOM! Now just color it in.

Work from left to right to keep from dragging your hand over the image.  Unless you are left handed, then…  you’re weird.  But probably really good at math.  If the image/text is detailed, make sure you cover all those details as you go.  That way, you won’t risk smudging the chalk by going back to add details.

“What?  This?  Yeah, I did that.”

You can hit it some aerosol hair spray to help it last longer.

Have some sweet chalkboard art?  Share it!