Again. Without turning this into a Motivation Monday, I have really found that when I anticipate that I’m going to fail at something, I usually do. I tested it out in the corner of this board, and another smaller board that I had in my office. I followed the instructions by shaking the marker and then pushing on the tip to start the flow of ink. I was so happy that I had decided to purchase a chalkboard marker because I knew it’s fine point would be much easier to work with. I knew that after tracing the entire piece, that it was going to be nearly impossible to go over it all with a piece of chalk because of how small the details were. When I had completely finished tracing over every letter and element, I carefully lifted up the paper and set it aside.
It brought me back to my days of art school and designing everything by hand. It was pretty faint but it was there! It took a little more than an hour to go over the entire design. While it took awhile to complete, it was a nice change from computer work and I actually found it to be relaxing. This time, I only began tracing over one small section before I lifted the page to make sure it was translating on the board.
I ran out of regular tape in the first run assembling all those pages together! The washi tape wasn’t to try to be pretty. Next, I taped the design to the chalkboard, which was a much better fit. I followed the exact same steps as I did with the first attempt, starting with printing the design and completely covering the back with chalk. I liked this board a lot better because I could shrink the page down to 8.5 x 11 and not have to deal with the page tiling nonsense. The surface felt legit and I knew I was already off to a better start. I went out to HomeGoods and found the awesome chalkboard/frame combo that you see below, for less money than the original. I hate to be negative, but if you are attempting this project, do not try it on this chalkboard. Whatever it was, even drawing with actual chalk on it barely took. It was a chalkboard but it felt like it had some sort of plastic coating on it. I started to question if I had even purchased a chalkboard and looked a little bit closer at it. I put the page back down and pressed harder with my pencil. Not even a trace of the design was appearing on the board. I lifted up the page, expecting to see my beautiful artwork come to life. MISTAKE.Īfter about a half hour, my curiosity had gotten the best of me. I started tracing each letter and some of the bottom elements with a pencil and really didn’t want to even peek to see how the image was translating on the board because I was afraid of shifting the page. I then rubbed the back side of the poster I had created with chalk, as the tutorials I found suggested, and then taped the page to the chalkboard. It took a good 45 minutes to get it all printed, trimmed and taped together.
I designed my print at the 17″ x 23″ dimensions and “tiled” the printing since I knew an 8.5 x 11 wouldn’t come close to filling up the board. I purchased a big old cheap chalkboard (17″ x 23″) from Michael’s thinking that I didn’t need anything fancy because my artwork was going to be the focus point of the piece. Had I published in the timeline that I promised, the post would have been titled: “The Great Chalkboard Disaster”, subtitle, “Michelle is a failure”. In that post, I mentioned that I’d be sharing the results of my own “chalkboard experiment” the following week. I started with lots of research- finding the best methods and the proper tools to use, which I shared in this post a couple weeks ago. After hearing that chalkboard art wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it was, I began a quest to create my own sign.
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