Chalkboard Art

I have really enjoyed seeing the interest in chalkboard art grow within the last several years, because the more interest, the more creativity and innovative uses, and the more I see and am inspired by it. There are some really talented hand-drawn type designers/artists out there, and I love seeing their work.

I have been so inspired recently, that I decided to try my hand at chalkboard art. The following two examples are my first and second attempts (I see some improvement already). I thought I'd show you some of my process work, including ideation sketches, well, mainly because these sorts of "behind the scenes" things are my favorite. (I'm a sucker for special features on DVDs too. I could watch the interviews for hours, and I have.) I hope they are interesting to you as well.

Attempt #1: Business Cards

I decided to hand-draw my business card to show that I love to work with my hands, and as much as I do a lot of design work on the computer, I mostly prefer the old analog ways of doing things. There is something really nice about the quality of something hand-drawn or hand-made.

Here's the process: 

First, I sketched out my design on regular old paper–I almost always do this. There are parts of the design process that come together better on paper, and some that come together better in the program. Since this was going to end up being a hand-drawn design, it might as well start that way. Once I got it generally the way I liked it, I made a sketch on the computer to see if what I was thinking would really fit proportionally within the card dimensions. It didn't really, so I changed a few things. Then I used the computer drawing as a template for my drawing. I used black card stock and a "white charcoal" pencil. How is it possible to make white charcoal? It cannot really be charcoal, right?

I transferred my drawing using graphite pencil before I began with the white charcoal pencil. Turns out if you use graphite first, the white pencil will not draw over it. So, I had to erase each letter and redraw it moving from letter to letter, element to element. Again, this was my first attempt at this, I was not expecting to move so slowly, nor was I expecting to have to erase and redraw in this way. But this is how we learn...

Below is the finished drawing on card stock. I then scanned it in and used Vistaprint for printing because the coupon I had cut the price way down, and hey, I'm just starting out on my own. The start up costs are really piling up.

They came in the mail this weekend, and I was stoked! The cropping wasn't great, but for the price, I think they turned out well. I had also hoped to be able to chose a rounded corner option (which I know they had before at some point) but I couldn't find it. Allora, I am content with these.

Attempt #2: Framed Gift

I recently joined the hospitality committee at our church, and the first event I will be helping with will be a thank you and "going away" of sorts for one of the teaching pastors and his family. I'm sure there will be a post in the near future showing all the fun flowers we made out of paper, and maybe even a few photos from the event itself. But this post is about chalkboard art, and so I wanted to share another piece I designed and hand drew as a gift for the family. 

The process:

Again, I started sketching on paper, but this time I didn't do any computer work. As you can see in the image below, I tried to work between individual element inspiration and the larger composition. 

Once I got a pretty good idea of what I wanted, I moved to another sheet of paper to sketch out my final composition to see how it worked. I knew I would still make a few changes during the actual execution, but I wanted to work any major issues out on paper first.

So, I went out and bought a framed picture for $10 from a flea market, took out the artwork, and painted it white. Then I cut some black paper down to size and used the matting that came with the picture to make the border line. Then, using a ruler, I mapped out the ribbon.

Next, the larger words were drawn in, using care not to smudge. I smudged anyway, and had to fix it, but such is life. I finally remembered the old scrap paper trick and used it under my hand when working over the already drawn words.

Then the smaller words and a test to see how thick I wanted the border. You can also see here the scale of the piece.

I was not satisfied at all with the "P" in peace. I must have redrawn it 15 times before I settled on one that I liked. But finally I left it and moved onto the other elements.

The finished piece (more or less):

I framed it and set it behind glass in case the spray fixative doesn't work as well as it should. I'm very pleased with it, overall, and have been seriously considering changing up the look of the header of my blog to reflect this sort of fun style. Actually, I had the idea to change the header before I even did my business cards. But, since I went through with this look for the cards, it only makes sense to give a cohesive look between them and the blog. What do you think?