Pinterest Report: Chalkboard Lettering and Tracing Tutorial

Hello!


Hope you're all staying warm! Here it went from being 60 degrees every day to 15 degrees in just 3 days or so. Where was the in between?!? This cold makes it hard to get anything big done. I am currently painting a desk in my kitchen for the Salvage Art sale for the Brookings Area Habitat for Humanity. I am hoping to share that project tomorrow (and hopefully it auctions off well!).

Since we're past Halloween, I decided it was time to update our chalkboard. A very talented lady back in Boone made some of these chalkboards for her friends, and I picked mine up second hand from one of those ladies. (I was SUPER excited to get it) I haven't really had a permanent chalkboard before I got this one, so I've been learning how to do hand lettering. I blogged before about the fake calligraphy tutorial I found on Pinterest. (Check out that post here).

I decided to try a different tutorial this month. Here is the pin I found. The gist of it is you print out the lettering, cover the back of the paper in chalk, put it on the chalkboard and trace and ta da, you have an outline for your artwork.


I've done similar things with graphite paper and hand painting lettering. (That was the pre-Silhouette days...now I'll just cut a stencil or vinyl). So, the idea seemed like it would work pretty good.


If you're artsy fartsy, you probably could make some really cool typography on your own. I am not in that regard. So I found one I liked and printed it across several sheets using Microsoft Publisher. If you don't have Publisher, you can also use a program called PosteRazor to print across several sheets of paper. I used it here to make large cut outs for my daughter's party.


Here's what my image looked like printed out and ready to be transferred.



The picture isn't blurry...blowing up a picture to a 18 x 20 sheet will make it grainy. Also, since I didn't want to use a ton of black ink and the image was white lettering on a black "chalkboard," I loaded the image into Microsoft Paint to inverse the colors and crop around the heart.

I did follow the tutorial I found on Pinterest, but I found that my large ape like arms made it difficult to trace the outline without removing the outline below it. I was quite the picture of grace with the chalkboard balancing on my lap, elbows and chest out trying to reach the top of the picture without wiping away the lower part. Now, in hindsight, I could have simply rotated the picture but I'm not sure about my skills writing upside down even with the outline. I ended up just free handing the bottom portion of the outline.

The best part of this entire project? I spent all that time tracing. I finished and went to hang it on the wall, and low and behold, I did the entire drawing upside down. Rather than start over, I just added picture wire to the other side. So now I can hang the chalkboard from either side and will never have to worry about having the right side up.

I'm pretty happy with the result. I may just have to try a more difficult picture for Christmas time.