Intro to Hand-Lettered Chalk Art

1. Preview: Chalk art isn't just for coffee shops and bakery menus. It's also a super fun and versatile addition to your own home decor, no matter your personal style and bonus, it's a great way to show off your mad hand lettering skills. Hi, I'm Kim track the calligrapher and illustrator behind hoopla letters. In this class, I'm going to show you how to create next level hand lettered chalk art that we'll have everyone asking. Did you do that? You'll learn step-by-step how to create your chalk art. From design to transfer to application techniques. You'll learn how to create flawless faux calligraphy and beautiful block letters and how to make them pop with shadows, dimension, and flourishes. If you've ever wanted to try your hand at chalk art, I hope you'll join me for class. See you soon. 2. Intro & Supplies: Hi everyone and welcome to class. I'm Kim track, the calligrapher and illustrator behind hoopla letters. Now as a chalk artist, I've had the opportunity to create oodles of a hand lettered chalkboards for restaurants, bakeries, businesses, parties, and homes. Needless to say, I love chalk art, both as an artist and as someone who is wildly indecisive. Let me explain. As an artist, chalk art is just plain fun. It's inexpensive, quick, easy to erase, totally low pressure and reminds me of being a kid. It except without the bowl cut and pink plastic glasses. And as someone who gets an itch to rearrange the furniture every few months. Chalk art is great because it can be easily changed with my mood or seasons. There is no need to store a bunch of Halloween or holiday art in the attic. Instead, I can just change up my chalk boards. In fact, that's what has made my in-person chalkboard classes so popular. Well that and the drinks. Regardless of exactly why people like my chalk art classes, the fact is that they are my most popular classes. And I am thrilled to be bringing a version of that class to you today. But before we get started, you're going to need a few things. First, I shot for its surface. I know this kinda falls into the category, but you're going to need some kind of surface to ride on, whether that's a chalkboard or a chalk wall. I'll get more into what to look for in your services in a later video. You're also going to need chalk, another no-brainer, I know, but you're going to need chalk for the chalk art course. I'm going to be using Crayola anti desk chalk, which is great for chalk art as well as versa chalk, chalk markers. I'm just going to be using white today, but both Crayola and verse a chalk have tons of color options as well. Now, a little side note, you might want to avoid sidewalk chalk. It tends to be a little thicker and really hard to sharpen. And as a result, it's going to give you clunky, chunky lines that we don't want. You're also going to want a damp rag and a Swiffer duster. So you just got to trust me on this one. Now, depending on your surface and your design, you might also need a ruler, a T-square painter's tape, Q-tips, and a pencil sharpener to get your chalk really sharp. So I'm going to have a list of all the supplies in the class resource section. So go ahead and gather up your supplies and then join me in the next video to talk about the do's and don'ts of choosing your chalk surface. See you there. 3. How to Choose Your Chalkboard: One of my favorite parts of my chalk artist job is creating chalk art for businesses. That means I usually get to the onsite, which is amazing, especially when it's a bakery. But there is a scenario I run into a lot when I go to businesses, they will show me their chalkboards and they will be covered in shadows of what was previously written on them. They'll tell me they've scrubbed and scrub and cannot get it off. They asked what they should do and that's when I have to drop the bad news, go get a new board or repaint this one, not what anyone wants to hear. Why does this happen? Well, it has to do with the material of the chalkboard. Chalk boards can be made from all different kinds of materials. Some of those materials like wood or MDF board that has been painted in chalk paint are porous. That means they are covered in teeny tiny microscopic holes. If you use a chalk marker on a porous board, the marker will seep into the pores over the course of weeks or months. It will start to saying, if you want to use a chalk marker, you need to use a non porous board. Non porous materials include slate, porcelain, acrylic, and vinyl. So how do you know if a board is porous or non porous? Well, first, look for the materials I've named here. If the board is porcelain, you know, you're good to go. Mdf board with chalk paint on it, put the marker down. Another hint is the price point. Those cheapy chalkboards you get at craft stores. Yeah, those are usually painted MDF board and we'll develop more ghosts in a haunted house. Though certainly not a given. Higher-priced boards tend to be made of better materials and usually note that they're non porous and suitable for chalk markers, have an old board and have no clue whether it's porous or not. Best to stick with regular chalk. But if you must use a marker, make some test marks in an inconspicuous spot and let them sit for about a week and then try to remove if they come off easily, you should be in the clear. But what if you are making your chalk art on a chalk wall? Never, ever, ever use chalk markers on a chalk wall. Unless you want to repaint the wall every single time you change the design, they are going to stain every time. Got it. Good. Then let's move on. In the next video, I'll show you how to prep your surface. See you there. 4. Prep Your Surface: If this is the first time you've used your chalkboard or chalk wall, you need to season it. Sadly, that does not mean dusting your board with paprika and garlic, salt. Seasoning or priming is the process of covering your board in a thin layer of chalk dust before you use it. Seasoning your chalkboard will prevent your chalk designs from leaving permanent marks on your board. The surfaces of chalkboards are imperfect, even if they are non porous, they can still have a little grooves are indentations on the surface. Chunk is a sneaky little beast and it can easily get stuck in those tiny crevices. If we don't season the board, the chalk from our designs can get stuck in there, leaving a ghostly reminder of chalkboards past. But if we fill in those crevices with dust from the very beginning, all our designs will be chalked on an even surface and will avoid any ghosting. Now while I love using Crayola anti desk chalk for my artwork, it's not great for seasoning. You want a regular, dusty old piece of chalk. Add the layer of chalk, rub it in to fill in all those little spaces, and then wipe it off. Easy peasy. Your board is now primed and ready for some incredible chalk art. 5. Create Your Design: Before you ever put chalk to board, you need to first create your design. Because hand lettering is going to be our focus. You want to start with a quote or phrase. Maybe you have something in mind. Great, go for it. But if you're stuck, had to Pinterest. I have a board full of puns and quotes I like for just such a writer's block moment. Just be careful with the Internet gang before you attribute a quote to someone. Better do another search to make sure they actually set it. Otherwise, you could end up with Alyssa lyric attributed to Jane Austen. If you are still stuck on what to do, take a look at the calendar and go with something seasonal. This is usually the route I take when I'm creating a new board from my home or for clients. Chalkboards are temporary, so lean into that. Maybe something witchy for Halloween or a flowery quote for spring, or maybe a summary pun. Once you've chosen your quote, it's time to lay it out. First, you're going to measure the writeable area of your top border wall. If there's a frame, don't count that. We just want the writeable area. Now divide those dimensions equally until it's small enough that you can fit three to four of them on a standard sheet of paper. Got those measurements. Good. It's time to take it to the sketchbook. I'm using a little bit of high-tech sketchbook. I'm using the iPad, I'm using the program procreate, but this will all work processes the same on paper as well. So don't fret. If you don't have this. My board that I'm going to be creating today is 24 by 36 ". To make sure that my little thumbnail sketches are proportional, I divided each by eight, and I came up with a three by 4.5 inch frame. I just drew up four of these frames so that I could come up with four different concepts. Very rough sketches of potential layouts for my quote. So you can see that they are all pretty different, right? It's, it's always a good idea to try a few things to see what works best. This will give you an opportunity to really see what it could look like rather than just going with your first idea of all of these, I liked this one the best little simple loops, it a little simpler. It allows us to do some script and some block lettering. I'm going to flesh that out. So once you've decided which concept to flesh out, you're either going to get a fresh piece of paper or you're going to open up a new document in Procreate or whatever design application you're going to use. Now you might need to do a little bit more math here depending on the size of your piece. So again, since my board isn't that large and I'm doing it digitally. I just made this document the same size of my board. But if you're doing something like a chalk wall or if you're working on paper, you're going to have to do a little bit of that math again to make sure that the smaller size is still going to be proportional to the board that you're using. So now, in this fresh document, you can see I fleshed out the idea that I chose, so I just did it in a rough calligraphy script. So now this piece doesn't need to look gallery perfect, right? This isn't we're not going to be printing this out and posting it on the wall, so it doesn't need to be Gallery perfect, but you do want to get it to a point, but it's pretty easy to replicate. So I have it to the point where I know exactly where I want everything to set the size incorrect, but I'm not going to worry about errant lines here and there. Now of course, the focus of this class is in creating actual chalk art, not in the design process. So this is just a quick and dirty version of laying out a quote for a design. If you are interested in an in-depth dive into laying out texts for artwork, I recommend you check out my course. Turn your calligraphy into a work of art that will show you all the steps that you need to use to get a pleasing and fun layout for your calligraphy or your block text. Once your design is complete, then you are ready to transfer it. So in the next video, I'm going to show you a few different ways to do that. 6. Transfer Your Design: Tracing Method: When I'm creating chalk art, there are two main methods that I use for transferring my designs to the chalkboard. The tracing method and the grid method. So I'm going to show you the tracing method first. So with this technique, you're going to need a printout of your design. So you see, I have my printout here. This one has a little bit more fleshed out than the one you just saw that we'll be doing on the larger chalkboard, but I just wanted to show you an example of a smaller design here. So this technique definitely works better for a smaller board. But if you do have access to a large format printer, you can make it work for a larger board as well. What you're going to do is take your printout, flip it over, and then with a piece of your Decebalus chalk, you're going to create a light layer of chalk over it. I know you're going to want to lay it flat and go like that, resist that urge. Because this is going to work much better. So I know the idea of using deathless chalk to create a nice desk layer on the back seems a little counter-intuitive. But the dust was chalk. It's not actually ductless, right? It just clumps together better. Because it clumps together better. It's going to give us better coverage back here and help us with our transfer. So the way this is going to work is once we get this all covered in chalk, I'm going to flip it over, placed it on my board, and then use a dull pencil or a ballpoint pen to trace over the design. And where I press, that is all covered in chalk. Chalk will transfer to the board and I will have a nice outline for my design. Okay, so now that I've got this all pretty well covered, may not be able to see in the video, but there are some little puddles of chalk, right? So I'm just going to take this and tap it, get off any excess chalk there. Okay. And now I'm going to lay it on my board and just use a couple of pieces of tape to make sure that it doesn't move. Now before I go and trace this entire thing, we wanna do a test. I'm gonna take this little area here. I'm going to apply pressure with the pencil. And then I'm just going to turn it, makes sure it's transferring. So you can see it is, we have that nice line there. Now you also see that it's a little bit messy, right? So, because it's a little bit messy and the chalk from the back gets all over. This is a method that is much better suited to working with chalk marker in my in-person classes. But this is the technique that we use and we're using chalk marker. So we don't really care if it's a little bit messy. So I won't, I won't go through this entire design. But that is the process there. So you can see when I pull that back, I have a nice little letter that I can trace. So now I have my chalk marker. Again, this is a non porous board, so I'm totally fine to use chalk marker here. Then I can use that as a guide. We'll just do a quick and dirty version here. Not worrying too much about making it perfect. That's gonna be a theme in today's class. We don't want to be too precious with it after all, chalk is temporary, right? I am Even chalk mark or even though it's a little bit as a little bit more staying power, it is temporary so we don't need to worry about things being too perfect. Okay, so once your design is dry, then you can take a Swiffer duster and get rid of all that excess, messy chalk. You can see that that duster really gets rid of everything really nice, right? And it leaves that chalk marker bind again, because this is a kind of a messy way to transfer. This is best if you are working with chalk marker. Now, if you want to work with regular chalk, there is a way that you can do the tracing method as well. I'm going to erase this just a little bit of water. Let's say we wanted to do this design, but we wanted to use regular chalk. Well, we can't exactly use the chalk covered background here, right, because we're going to have a huge mess. So I have another printout. And then I have this special paper, this is sterile paper cache here. It's just a type of transfer paper. This is white. Of course we can see it again. The guns, the Ford. What you're going to do is lay the paper on your chalkboard, place your design over top, and then we can do the tracing bit again. With this method. We're going to do the same, same basic thing. But because the back of our template isn't totally covered in chalk and we're relying on this paper, then that's going to give us a cleaner look. Now there is still going to be some errant chalk, but not as bad as are other versions. So we'll just do one letter there. Take a peek. You can see we do still have some errant chalk, but it's not nearly, not nearly as much. So this is a great method. If you then wanted to go back in with regular chalk and do the tracing? The reason that I don't typically do this when I'm using regular chalk is because it does still leave a little bit of a mess, right? And I prefer to have if I'm going to go through all that trouble, I prefer to have next to no mess. And also sterile papers clean of expensive now you can use it multiple times. But I feel like it works just as well the other way for chalk marker and for using regular chalk. Again, this is not my preferred method. My preferred method when I'm using a regular planning on using regular chalk, my preferred method to transfer the design is the grid method, which I'm going to show you now. 7. Transfer Your Design: Grid Method: Another method of transferring your design that's great to use if you're using regular chalk, especially if you're using a larger surface, is the grid method. In the grid method, unfortunately, it does require a little bit, a little bit of math. Again, what we're going to do is divide our design and our Chuck surface in to an equal number of squares, creating a grid so that we can then look at the design, how it's sitting on the grid on our page, and then recreate that on the board. Like I said, unfortunately, there is a little bit of math involved. What you'll wanna do is take the length of your piece and decide how many squares you want in there and divide it by that number. So generally, I suggest at least, at least five squares. Now if your design is pretty intricate, of course you're going to want more. When I'm doing like a big chalk wall, I use many, many squares. I use about a square every foot. Just because that helps, helps me as I'm as I'm transferring it over to the board. But like I said, you can make that choice depending on how complex your design is, what you'll wanna do. Like I said, you'll measure the length and divide it by the number of squares. And once you get that number, then you will do the same up and down as well so that you've got a nice grid. Now what that might mean is that you're left with sort of half grid at the bottom. That's okay. Doesn't need to be perfect. But if you are using Procreate, I'm going to show you a little trick. That's going to mean less math for you, which is always a good thing. So you're going to go over here to the Actions button and then turn on the Drawing Guide. You'll see that that creates a grid all around my paper. Now this is not a complex designs, so I don't need this many squares. I'm going to go into Edit Drawing Guide. And I'm going to go ahead and turn the opacity all the way up. So you can really see that grid down here with grid size. I'm going to toggle that until I get, Let's go with six squares across. So let's see. There we go. Six squares. Then you can use your finger over the blue dot there and you can sort of move it around to make sure that those squares are pretty even. That you don't have space on either side as much as you can, right? We're not worried about getting perfect. So there you go. So you can see here that I've got nice six squares across. And then it automatically creates a square is going down. You can see that the square on the bottom is cropped a little short. That's okay. That's just something that I'll note when I'm transferring it over to the board. What's really helpful for me is to have this line right here. I'm going to hit Done. And you can see that I've got a nice grid. They're super easy, had to do less math, which is always great. Now, if you are going to print this out, you should note that the grid does not print. I like to hold the iPad and reference it as I'm drawing, so I don't necessarily need to do this, but if you're going to print it out, just get an ink, any sort of standard ink and then just trace along here so that you have a nice solid grid that you can then print out and look at. So now what we're going to do, now that we have our piece evenly divided up, we are going to move over to our chalk surface and divide it into the same number of squares. I'm going to go ahead and just finish this so we can print this out if we need to. Again, we don't need to worry about being too perfect. This is just a guide. I want to get it as straight as possible. Alright, so now we're going to take this grid and transfer it over to our chalk surface. So now that you have divided up your design into a grid, now we're going to transfer that grid over your board. So I did a little bit of math and the width of my board is 33 ". And on my design, I have the width divided into a grid of six, right? So dividing 33 by six, that gives me 5.5. I'm going to go along my board here and Mark every five-and-a-half inches. I'm using a chalk pencil right now. Oops. Did that backwards. Make sure you have the ruler going the correct way. That's a good thing to do. There we go. I thought that looked a little bit. So I'm using the chalk pencil right now. I'm making the marks much darker than I normally would. So that you can see them. There we go. Okay, so now we've got our six lines mark there. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do a few of these across as well. Just to help me when I'm drawing the guideline down. Like I said, this is a great method when you are doing a large, a large chalkboard, large wall. And we'll just do one more. Now. Again, if you are using a, if you have a very intricate design, you might want a lot more than six squares going across. But for our purposes today, we don't need anything too complicated. Okay? So now that I have that going to draw straight lines down, again, I'm making this one way you darker that you should make it just so that you can see it in the video. If you're wondering what kind of ruler this is. This is a quilting ruler. That's why it maybe it looks a little bit different. You don't have to have this kind. I just like it because it's see-through and I just find helpful. Okay, so now I'm going to do the same measurements from the top. Now, my last square is just a little bit short. That's okay. I will remember that as I am transferring the design again, this doesn't need to be perfect. This is just giving us a good place to start from. And as you get better and better at this, you won't need to do these grids anymore for simpler designs. I always recommend them if your design is very intricate. But for simple ones, eventually, you won't need to even do this. Alright? So now I have my grid, grid it out. Like I said, yours is going to be much lighter than this. But so now I'm going to take a look at my design. And based on where things lie here within the grid, I can recreate it over here. So I can see that the G is going to be, it expands down below. Three squares. Starts out in the middle of the second grid here. Again, I don't need to be perfect here. This just gives me a pretty good guide about where to lay things out in. Other reason that that's nice is because you don't want to get started, do a lot of work and then realize, Oh no, everything is off-center. Really don't want that. So this really helps make sure that everything stays true. Your original design. So I would just go through the rest of the process, going through the rest of the grid here. And I can outline the entire design. And then from there, what I would do is I would go in and clean up any of these errant lines. So the great thing about the chalk pencil tool is that it's very light and easy to remove. You can use your finger or if you want to be really precise with it, you can use a Q-tip so you can go in here, a little grid lines and get rid of it there. You want to clean up as much as possible before you actually add the chalk to it. That will help save you a lot of headaches later, right? There is one additional transfer method that I don't use all that often, but I thought I would mention it. And that is a projector. Projectors are awesome because they are quick and allow you to be super detailed. They are expensive. And the reason I don't usually use them is because a lot of my chalkboard work takes place at homes and businesses. And the daytime projectors need dark, so it's just not feasible for me. But if this is a board for your own home and you don't mind working in the dark a little bit. Oh, for it. Now that we have our designs transferred to our boards, it's time to start drawing. In the next few videos, I'll show you some of my favorite hand lettered chalk art techniques. 8. Faux Calligraphy: I'm a calligrapher. So obviously I use a lot of calligraphy in my designs, even in chalk art. And so in this video I'm going to show you some techniques for making your chalk art look like calligraphy. So the first thing you're going to want to do if you haven't already with your chalk. So I'm gonna be using regular chalk today. If you use a chalk marker, the same rules still apply. But if you are using regular chalk before you do any kind of calligraphy, I recommend you sharpen it. So I have just a standard pencil sharpener. One difference is it has two holes in it and one of them is larger. That's what you want to look for when you get one that will actually work with chalk. So I've got my deathless, deathless chalk here. Then I'm going to be using the hallmark of calligraphy. If you've not taken the class before is the presence of thin and thick lines within our script. We can't. The way we do that in calligraphy is by changing the way we apply pressure. Obviously that doesn't really matter it with chalk. We're gonna give it the look of calligraphy by adding some thick parts and some thin parts. I have my design done here, the big Ruby or leave, I've got a an outline of it here. Right now. Maybe it looks like it says leave, but it doesn't because big revere leaf. So I'm going to show you that process of making the faux calligraphy. So the first thing I wanna do is find the script and go ahead and trace it out. So I've got my sharpened piece of chalk here. And I'm just going to trace over my outline. Not crazy about this right here. Let's go ahead and check that. You want to make sure you have your duster on you so that you can make little corrections. There we go. Okay, great, so that's one of our script, so we'll just start with that. So in calligraphy, actually I'll make a quick change. You're seeing real time here. I don't like the angle and let's just fix that up. Better. I like that better. Okay. So in calligraphy, the thick lines come whenever you're bringing the pin down. So to get the calligraphy look, where we're going to do is trace over what we just did. But anytime we're bringing the chalk down, we're going to add a little bit of thickness there. So here's what I mean by that. By going around the G. This is an upstroke. And then I'm coming down here, so I'm just going to add some thickness. You see, when I get to the bottom, I taper it off. So it's not just a hard line, it curves in and then it curves down at the bottom. And then I can fill that. So we'll just do a rough fill in for now and then I'll go through and show you the rest. So you just want to go through the rest of your letters and add the thickness. You see how I taper and the bottom there. We don't want a hard a hard edge. We want it to be smooth and flow. Just like it's actual calligraphy. Luck and good and maybe a little bit more thick, a little bit more thickness. So you wanna make sure that you keep it consistent. That's one thing that does make it a little bit different than regular calligraphy. You don't have you have to work a little bit harder to keep it, to keep it consistent and we'll clean up the rest of it later. But for now, you can't tell I have no perfectionist tendencies at all. We're just going to go through the rest of us. Can add in our thickness. Now one thing to note here, whenever you have something like this where we go from an upstroke into a downstroke here. If we start the thickness right here is going to look a little bit odd. So when, when you have one of these scenarios, you always want to make it thick on the outside. You want to move that thickness to the outside. That's all well chunky there, maybe a little chunkier than we need it. That's okay. Okay. So once you have that all done, you can take a look at it and maybe fix up some parts. So again, I'm doing a rough one here. I'm normally would go in and make sure that was all really filled in. But it looks like the thickness is pretty even throughout this is maybe a little bit beefier. So I might want to go back and then that out a little bit. If you wanted to make your difference between thin and thick, a little less dramatic, right? You can always add a little bit of thickness to the thin lines as well. So I like where this is, this is kinda how I want it. But let's say you were making this like really, really huge. Then what you would do is you would just add some thickness to those thin lines as well. So let's take a look at our design and let's do, let's go ahead and do the rest of the script words. So it looks like or here. Okay, that's good. Okay, so that's just the basic way that you get that nice calligraphy luck. Now in the next video, we are going to do these block letters and leave and b. So I'll see you there. 9. Block Lettering: Now we're going to try some block lettering. So the block lettering, this sounds like, right, that's kinda like if you were just doing print. So you have a couple of different options here, right? You can do it so that it's just the thickness of the chalk, kind of like this area of the calligraphy. But for my purposes, I would like to make this a little bit thicker. I really would like to make it just a little bit, just a little bit thicker. I'm actually going to always adjusting. Always adjusting. The way that you want to do these block letters is first to draw what I like to call a skeleton, right? So you can see that I've just written them out just like I would if I were printing. I haven't tried to build them out yet. I have just written them in one thickness. This is going to serve as the skeleton for my letters. So what that means is every thing, all this thickness is going to be built around here. Alright? You can see I have b and leave are going to be in block. So this is, everybody has their own method, right? But what I like to do is draw around these letters. So if I'm gonna do a sans serifs, that means there's no, nothing, no tail and nothing extra and fancy around this. I am going to take my sharpened piece of chalk and just draw around each line. Now, I know I'm going to fill this in. I'm not that worried about overlapping or anything like that because I'm going to fill this in. If you're not going to fill it in, you'll need to be a little bit more a little bit more careful. You can see I just went all the way around that skeleton. Now, I'm not going to be too precious about it. And what I mean by that is I'm not going to get out my ruler and measure millimeters to make sure it's all the same thickness. I'm just going to eyeball it. But you be as precise as you want to be. So you can see that there and then I can go ahead and fill that in. There we go. So looking at this, I won't be too picky about it. But if I always clean this up for our board at my house or for a client, I would smooth that end right there because it's just a little bit beefier than the rest of the letter. But I'll let it slide. I'll let it slide this time. He's a now we're going to do the same down here. I'm going to make this just a little bit wider. So now for this one, what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to try to leave this one open. So you can see the process for that. So I'm just being a little bit more a little bit more precise and a little bit more careful about each of my marks. Now remember, when I'm doing this, that these are the chalk lines that I have. The skeletons are actually much darker than I would normally have them. I have them darker just so you all can see them. But normally, they would be much, much lighter. So that erasing them would not be an issue. So you can see that process for how we go about that. I won't go go through the rest of it, so you're just going to outline it. Now, this is one way to make block letters. There are so many more. And I'm going to show you now say goodbye to be Groovy or leave man, I guess we weren't groovy enough. So it's got to leave. We're gonna get rid of it. Okay, so now we have a clean board. So I'm going to show you a few other ways that you can do block letters. So I just showed you the really simple way, Michelle, you some fun ways. But before I do, I'm going to show you my little secret weapon for getting a straight block letters, and that is painter's tape. This is great, especially when you're doing menus, right? Because we have lots of little things to write. The painter's tape easily comes off and it's already a straight line. So if we want to make sure all of our block letters stay on the straight line, we can just use this now I'm eyeballing it. Use a level. Don't be like me, right? But this way we have a nice straight line and then instead of having to erase a bunch of guidelines, we don't have to do that later. Like I said, this, I use mostly when I'm working at businesses, especially for menus. A lot of people have a lot of items. This is a very, very helpful, but it will also be helpful for us now as we are creating some new block letters. So I'm going to show you a few different takes on what we just did. So the first is a Sarah, right? So I'm gonna go ahead and just draw the skeleton of our letter a here. Pretty standard. So to add a Sarah, Sarah is just a tail, right? So we're going to outline this just as we would, just as we would our other standard block letter. Again, we're going to assume here that I'm filling this in, so we're not going to worry about overlap. Now what we're going to do, what makes the syrup different is that we're going to add, like I said, the little tails on the bottom. So if you aren't sure where the tail goes on your letter, just go to a word processor. Just look up Times New Roman and see where they go. So I'm going to draw little squares on the bottom here. You'll see I'm not exactly touching this line again. I don't want it to mess it up when I remove it. I just am hovering it just a little bit. Okay, So I'm gonna draw these boxes here. That one's a little bit larger, so I'll just go ahead and make this one a little bit larger to. Now, we want to make sure that that transition is nice and smooth. So if you want to have the sharp edge right there, That's fine. But I would like mine to be a little bit more rounded. So I'm just going to draw a little curve there on both of these edges. Now we can fill it in. There you go. So you have a nice little serif letter. So this can make things just a little bit fancier if you want. Now I'm going to show you something that is definitely not fancy, but it's one of my favorites. And that is a sailor tattoo style. So we'll go with the letter B here. So again, I'm just going to draw my skeleton. I'm not gonna be worried right now about filling it in. This one is not going to be all the way filled in. The way that you do this one, the outline just like you did before or around your letters. The one thing that's going to make this really different is the spine of your letter. Whatever is on the left-hand side, that's gonna be pretty thick. So we're going to make that pretty thick like that. Now, the elements on the right side, those are going to be just a thin wine. We're not going to add any thickness to those at all. You can see that I extended it beyond this thickness here, beyond the thick spine, making little serifs but just not fancy ones, right? I'll do the same along the bottom there. Now what really takes us home makes it the sailor tattoo look is you fill in the bottom here. That's it. That's all you do. So again, it's just a very thick spine. And then the other elements are all in a model line, so just like a single thin line and then you fill in the bottom. Now, if you have a letter e.g. like a, but it's not necessarily or let's say a is putting have to maybe the letter C That's not cut in half. You're just going to add the line in the middle and fill in the bottom. If it doesn't naturally cut that way. Good. Okay, so now let's take it, let's take it back to middle school and we're gonna do a bubble letter. So ten to a bubble letter, you're really just going to round everything. So we'll go with the letter C. What works for a bubble letter, right? I'm just going to draw the spine here are the skeleton rather. Okay. And now I'm just going to really exaggerate this. I'm going to really round out the top. Gonna make it extra chunky. Here we go. We have a nice little bubble letter. Now again, I might go in there. A little bit more thickness in the middle. I guess I didn't really need to erase it. I could've just gone over. Okay. And then you can fill that in. Or if you wanted to give it a ballooning lock, you could fill it in and add a little highlight. I'll show you what I mean. You're just fill it in. Then use your finger. Just smooth it out. Just be careful to watch the edges. You don't have to use your finger for this. You can use a Q-tip if you want. Alright, so that you get a really smooth look there. And then we're going to take a Q-tip with just a little bit of water on it. And we're going to add some highlight marks, like if it were a balloon. So I'm just going to take you see that adds like almost like it's a little balloon. We'll do another one over here. Another one down here. Okay, Now we'll take our finger again and just blend it in. Oops, there's a little wet when I tried to do that. So you can see how it starts to give it a little bit of dimension. And you would just keep taking keep using that Q-tip with just a tiny bit of water to give it even more dimensionality there. Now you'd want to wait for it to dry. I'm not doing that. I'm being a little impatient and just keep kinda smoothing it out. And then gives you a little bit of a little bit of dimension. There. I went, didn't wasn't quite patient enough. There we go. So you get the idea? I'll leave it. I'm going to leave it alone now. Okay, And then our last one is more of a modern look. This is a through line. For this one. You want to again, just like with all of these, you want to keep your skeleton really light. But again, I'm just showing you this for now. So with this one, you're going to have to be really careful to not get anything in the center. So I just kinda use that as my outline instead of a skeleton. Okay, So then we have that and then I'm gonna take my chalk pencil. Because I want a really fine line here. We're going to draw a straight line all the way through. So this is almost like you can see the skeleton, right? But we're having it really cleaned up. This gives it a cool modern look. Then you can make your letter even thicker. And that can add a little bit more dimension there as well. So those are just a few fun ways that you can upgrade your block letters. It's still the same basic process that we did for our very standard about block ladder is just adding a couple extra things. Now, in the next video, I'm going to show you how to make all of your letters really pop with shadow and dimension. 10. Shadow & Dimension: Now that we have your lovely hand lettered chalk art, I'm going to show you how to make it pop with a little bit of dimensionality. So the first thing I'm going to show you is how to create a simple shadow. Now this is one of those things that's deceptively easy to do, and it does make a huge difference. The first thing you need to do is choose your light source. So to make it look like a shadow, it needs to be consistent. And to be consistent, we have to have one light source. So I usually pick top-left is my light source. Just kinda how I prefer it, but you can use wherever works best for your designer, just your personal preference. Now with our light source up here, what we wanna do is draw a shadow with it being in the top-left, the shadow is going to go on the bottom and to the right of our letters. So I'm going to just add a simple line as a shadow. So you can see, I'll start right here. And I'm just going to very carefully this line all the way around. Now curves are a little bit tricky because the shadow, you have to place it around the curve. But if you just remember to keep it to the bottom and to the right, doesn't have to be perfect. This is one of those things that like while you're doing it, you're like, oh, this doesn't look good. But anyway they get done. You're like, Oh, okay. I'm just going to go all the way around. We want to keep it as evenly spaced away from our letter as possible. But again, just like with everything in chalk art, you don't need to be too precious about it because remember, it's all temporary. Not to get too meta on you, but it's not going to last. So we don't need to fret over it too much. So I'm just going to go the whole way around the word. One thing you might notice as I'm doing this, is I'm doing all the lines down. I find it's easier to maintain a straight line when you are pulling it down and towards you. That's the reason that I do it this way. But again, feel free to do what works best for you. Okay? So you can see that that gives it a little bit of dimensionality, adds a little bit of shadow to it. Now, you can take it up a notch, right? If you want to add to make, give it a little bit more thickness, you can always add some direction lines, just like very small pockmarks like that all the way around. That can give it a little bit, a little bit more. In terms of a shadow. Again, you just want to make sure that you're keeping the angle of those lines. Correct. So even you can see just there, I already kinda made it a little steak. That's a little bit trickier to do. Definitely doable though. Another thing that you can do is you can add a little bit of blending, do a little bit of smudging here. To give it a really hover, a look to make it look like it's really hovering. The trick with that though, is to make sure that you've got this empty black space right there. You don't have to use your finger. You can use a Q-tip. And if you're gonna go with this method, you will have to, it'll take a couple of tries, right? You have to go kinda fill it in a little bit more as you go. And so that can give you, that can really give the appearance of all it's floating on my god, how did it do that? That's a cool way, a cool thing to do as well. Another easy way to kinda add a little off to the shadow, of course, is to just make it a little thicker. And you don't have to add those hash marks. You can just go back and make it a little thicker. Now, if you're gonna do this method. If you want to make it just a little bit thicker, what I typically recommend is that you wanna do that in a different color because what happens and you can see what's happening here is it starts to look like it's part of the letter. You just wanna do that in a different color if that's the method that you want to take right? Now, I'm going to show you another way to do a shadow that's going to be adding a little bit of the middle gray into our work. This method works really great for things like banners, right? So if you are going to be creating a banner with a phrase on it, because we're going to be filling in the background with, like I said, that middle gray and then we're going to be using a little bit of water on a Q-tip to get some negative space to create our shadow. So the first thing you wanna do, just create your banner. Just do something really simple here. Now, just know that as you, as you do this, these edges are going to get messed up. You're going to have to definitely clean that up later. Now you're going to take the side of your chalk and you're going to fill that in. And then you're going to use your finger to blend it out. Like I said, you're going to mess up your edge there. That's okay. If you want to use your, use your painter's tape here, That's a really great way to get a really hard edge. For now. We'll just do it this way. You can see I didn't quite get all the erasing off there. So little bit of a shadow of our h2 ray that we just did since I didn't add water. That's alright for now. But just know that that's why you want to go over and after you've removed it was a slipper. You want to go over it with a little bit of water as well just to get any of those lingering marks off. Okay, so we'll say this is good for now. So I'm going to now write my word on here. Now you want to make sure that this is a course dark enough that we're gonna be able to create our shadow with negative space, but it also needs to be light enough that we have enough contrast with our word. I'm just going to do high and I, you know what? I think that that's enough contrast there, that looks pretty good. Now we do want to fill this bad boy in. Burns are a lot of chalk here. Which brings me to a, another little point here. Whenever you are doing chalk art, especially if you, I mean at home like who cares, It doesn't matter if you're doing it out in public restaurants or a bakery, or even at a client's house. You would think this goes without saying, but you should really avoid wearing dark colors or black because all the chalk is gonna get on you. And the reason I say you would think that goes without saying is because inevitably, I do it every time, every time I am doing a chalkboard, I don t think about it and I go and I'm wearing black or dark colors. And then I wipe the chalk on me and then I've got nice handprints all over me for the rest of the day and don't realize it until I get home. So really light colors. A little bit of embarrassment. Alright, so now I have that filled in. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna get a Q-tip and doesn't have to be Q-tip. That's just kinda my go-to because I like the thickness of the Q-tip. It's the right size. It's going to dip it in a little bit of water, dab it off. We want it to be damp but not, not too wet. Now again, using that same light source, we're just going to draw along the outside of our letter. Now, the one thing about this, because remember, water doesn't get rid of the chalk. It just pushes it around. So you're going to need to do a fair amount of rinsing and reapply. In fact, the more Q-tips that you have on hand that aren't needed normally, I'm not I tried to avoid wasting things like this, but this is one of those things that you really have to rinse it off. Otherwise you're just going to end up with kind of a oaky, gooey mess right? Now you'll notice that as it dries, it won't be quite as stark. The contrast won't be quite as dark. What'll happen is you'll get a lighter gray instead of the true negative space of the black. And that's okay, we can go back in. And Do a little bit more. So again, we've got a curve here. A little, a little creative with how we do that. So when you're doing a curve again, you just want to think about where the light would be. And it's not going to go all the way to the edge because it is kinda curved up. Don't need to be perfect. And it might seem like a really complicated at first. At first it kind of is because you're just, you aren't used to it. But the more you do it, the easier that will be. I remember when I first started trying to add shadows to my work, I felt like I was doing calculus. But then the more you do it, the better you get at it. So you can see adds a little bit of dimension. Now as it dries, it's going to start to, like I said, become a little bit gray. So you're just wandering, going to go back over it again. You can maybe even add a little bit more thickness to it to really drive that home. But this is a really unexpected way to add shadow. And like I said, it works great for banners or things like that. So there's another thing that you can do to add dimensionality and that is to actually make the letters in 3D. So I'm going to show you how to do that now. Lucy, a cookie, cookie mass. We're going to have a really clean this up. We'll be right back. One last way I'm going to show you how to add dimensionality to your letters is to actually make them look 3D. So not just a shadow, but we're going to make them actually pop off the board. So what you're gonna wanna do for this is it's very similar to this shadow, right? You're going to again identify your light source and it's kind of a bad sign, will let it, let it slide. And then you're going to draw your lines all around your letters. Now, what's gonna be different from the shadow though, is that you're going to connect those lines back on to the actual letter. You can start by drawing lines from all of the corners and connecting points. So you want to keep them at the same angle as you go. Now this is a step you can skip if you don't want to. If you don't want to have the corner lines here, you can definitely skip this step. But definitely when you're learning. This is really helpful, especially around curves like that. So you see how I had to curve it back into the letter. Same for right there. You see how that gives it a little bit more dimension. Now you can add some lines in there to really hammer for that message that this is three-dimensional. So you would just go keep consistent with the angle of that line. Going all the way around. Okay, Let's try one with a curve here. So a curve with all curves like an OH, and you don't necessarily have those corner points. How do you go about it? Well, again, you just want to make sure that it's consistent. So I'm not going to get out the ruler, but it's about the width of my ring finger, right? So I'll just look kinda lay my ring finger there and sort of eyeball it. Here we go. Then what we'll do is we'll draw some straight lines from the top and the bottom. And then will curve them around a little bit off there. That's okay. Fix that up. Doesn't need to be perfect the first time you don't get a prize for getting it right and perfect the very first try. I mean, that'd be cool if you did, but you don't. Sorry. Now another thing that you can do to give it a little bit more unfair is you can add some shading, right? So you can do shading with the cross, the tacking that we did here. So what that would look like is you got to think about on the letter where there would be shade on the dimensionality. I know I'm asking you to think about something, really abstract things. But again, once the more you do this, the more it will make sense in the middle, you're good at it. So to kinda give that look of shadow on the dimensionality, you keep the cross hatch lines rather very close together where there would be shadow. And then you spread them out more as you get down, right? So if we're thinking about this, there would be shadow kind of up in the top corner. Just spread it out a little bit. And then the same over here, there would be some more shadow at the bottom. And then it would start to space out. So right now, I'm doing a rough job. Of course, you want to make sure that you keep these lines nice and clean and that you keep them all going on the same angle. Okay, now for this last one here, we're going to skip doing these corner, these corner lines instead we're just gonna do a straight line all around the outside. And I can already tell I kinda messed up the angle a little bit there. Again, you'll get better at this the more you do it. But even if you do it a lot like I do a lot of mistakes, that's okay. Go again with these curves, right? Okay, so now we have a nice blank space here too. If you wanted to have your letter totally filled in. And then that can be a nice little change there. You can also just like we did some dimensionality here with the crosshatching, you can blend it as well. So what we would do is just what we did here. And then we'll just blend it out. And then of course, the areas where the areas where there are less marks, there's gonna be less chalk. So we're gonna get a lighter area. You can go in and out a little bit more. Then you can also use your duster. If you just lightly dab it. Can pick up like let's say you get too much in an area that can lightly pick it up. And you always want to go from the most dense areas of chalk to the least dense areas of chalk when you're blending. Because that will, It's kind of if you start from a dense area and then you swipe it, it gets less and less as you go. So if you start swiping from this direction, you're going to lose that, that blend there. So that's another way that you can add dimension, make those letters really pop. Now if you wanted to go really crazy, you could also add a shadow to this. Like I said, lots of different ways to make these letters really come off the board. Now there's one final thing that I think can add a little bit of to your Hamlet or chalk art and that are, that is rather that is flourishes as well as some a tiny little doodles. So I'm going to show you a few of my favorites in the next video. 11. Flourishes, Doodles & Wreaths: Hand lettered. Chuck R is great on its own, but adding a few more flourishes and doodles can really elevate it, take it to the next level. So I'm going to show you a few of my favorites, right? So the first little technique I'm going to show you, I like to call the puffy cloud. Okay? So that works when you have a phrase like this where maybe there's like lots of debits and changes in the way that the shape is made, but you want it to look a little bit more circular. So with this, what I do is I just add little puffy clouds shapes all the way around. I kinda do it in segments CC. So it doesn't, so that it's not just like one giant homogeneous thing and it makes it a little bit lighter, right? So it just kind of add these all around and then you can double up on the layers there. But C is rounds the whole thing out and it contains it. So that's the puffy cloud. Very easy. Another one that I like to add a lot is called the sparkle. Okay? And the sparkle is a great way to emphasize certain words or to frame your piece. So e.g. here, maybe we would want there's some space right here and some space right here. That would work really well for a sparkle. So to do that, I'm just going to draw some stars. I usually do not. Usually, I always do three. And you can make them a little asterisk like that, or you can draw a whole star. And then to make it twinkle a little bit, I just add in tiny dots. So it just gives a little bit of, I think, twinkle, a little bit of sparkle into the hole, into the whole thing. And like I said, you can do this on a particular word or you can do it to frame out the piece. Another technique that I use, it's super-duper easy. I call it the triple dash. So the triple dash, just what it sounds like. That is used for highlighting a word. Like, let's say we were going to use this phrase, I'll get rid of, get rid of the puffy cloud. I would want to make really emphasized, right? So I want to emphasize the word really. So I'm going to triple dash it. So you can do very simple triple dash like this. Just lines to add emphasis. You can make kind of a blocky outlines. Now you'll notice that the center one, I usually make a little bit longer. Again, just kinda rounds it out, it gives it a nice shape. Another version of that triple dash you can do is like a teardrop. So this is another one I use pretty frequently. You just draw a little teardrop. And that helps to emphasize your word. Another emphasis. So those are just a few really simple flourishes that I like to add. Now, one that's a little bit more, a little bit more complicated. But it's actually pretty deceptively easy to make is the reef. So I see a ton of reads in hand lettering and chalk art. I'm sure you do too. And I remember when I was first starting, I was like, How did they do this? It's like magic. So I'm gonna show you the simple way to go about it. I'm going to use my chalk pencil. And let's say I had a phrase here in the middle and I wanted to do a wreath around it. So I'm going to draw out my circle. Now again, you'd be doing this a lot lighter than I'm doing it right now. Now the trick with the wreath is to make sure that things are evenly spaced out, but that they don't look too homogenous. First thing we're gonna do is we're going to make three big circles that are evenly spaced out. So I do start with the one at top. One here, one here. Now in these spaces, we're going to want to put some larger elements. So let's say if you're doing like a Thanksgiving board, right? Maybe in these spots you put a turkey and a piece of pie and a pumpkin, right? So for our purposes right now, I'm just going to do the standard flower botanical wreath. So I'm just going to add, I use my regular chalk here. I'm just going to add in some little flowers. It's like a Xenia one there. And let's see over here, I'll do some simple ones for now. You do want to keep them about the same size. It's not they don't have to be exactly the same, but you don't want one to be really big and wanted to be really small. These needs to be kind of about the same size so that the anchor everything together. My chalk needs to be just a little bit sharper for this, but that's okay. And then let's see up here. Let's do, let's do a morning glory. Now we're going to do the same thing in the other spaces. I'm gonna draw some circles here. Okay, Now for these, instead of doing the flower, why? No, I think I'll do some leaf clusters in these spots here. So we'll add a little flower there. But for the most part we'll just make it some leaves and berries. And then here we will do. So you can see we're just adding some little botanical elements. Don't need to be perfect, just like everything with chalk art, especially botanical stone, because in nature nothing's perfect. Right? Now we're just going to fill in the other spaces with some more little botanical items. I like to use. Leaves and little dots. And like evergreen sprigs are a nice little thing to add in there too. You can also, depending on the season, you could add in bees or butterflies, just little things to fill in the space. Now you do want to have the direction going around the wreath. And you want to make them you want to make them pretty small. So when I say the direction, it doesn't have to be precise all the way around, right? Because you can see that kinda goes that way. But we just want to kinda, with the general flow of things, keep it going the right direction. We want to keep the flow going. One way is when I, is what I'm trying to say. Add a little leaf to that morning glory there. These I made maybe just a little close together. That's okay. Then you're going to form this point you're going to go through and just sort of add things to balance it out. Leaf there. So we have a nice little botanical wreath and all you have to do is kinda divide it into those groups of three. Now you can see we've got like the chalk and the background. If you wanted to get rid of that again, use your finger, use your Q-tip to get rid of those areas. And that's it. That's a great way to create your own little reef, to make your lettering yearly really pop. And how fun with this, make it, make it related to your quote, maybe it's a summer p. So instead of flowers, these are popsicles and pull floating or like I said, Thanksgiving or Halloween. Maybe you've got like a werewolf, vampire in which hat? Have fun with it, make it your own. It doesn't have to be all flowers all the time. 12. Cleaning Your Surface: Chalk art by definition is temporary, sad, but true after all your hard work, eventually you will need to erase what you've done. So what's the best way to do that? Well, if you have used standard chalk, the absolute best way to remove your chalk and clean your board is a Swiffer duster or any dust or like this. The reason I love these is because instead of just moving the dust around, they actually pick them up. So you can just go over like this. I know it's so sad. So you'll get used to it after awhile. So you'll just go over and erase as much as it as you can with a duster. Now you'll notice that you can see just a little bit of shadow of it. The more you rub that away, that will start to disappear. I like to clouded us there. Get some of that up. Now, if you go straight at your board with a damp rag, it's just going to move the chalk around and you're going to have not a very good look. You want to make sure you use a duster first to really pick that up. Then if you want to get some more chalk or if it's left any marks, if what's been on there for awhile, you just use a damp rag and that can get any additional chock off there. But again, you don't want to start with this step. Now, if you're trying to get chalk marker off, again, just a damp rag will do. Some chalk markers, might leave a little bit of residue behind if they are certain colors. So I've found that red chalk markers and blue chalk markers tend to leave a little bit behind. If that happens, you can try using a little bit of Windex. And the Windex can help get any stubborn stains off. Also, a magic eraser is really great for getting those stubborn, stubborn marks off. But that only is going to work if you're using a non porous chalkboard. If you're using a porous chalkboard, unfortunately, that chalk marker is not going anywhere. You can try a little bit of magic eraser, but it's probably not going to happen. So again, make sure you're using the right kind of bored if you're going to use the chalk marker. And that's it. That's how you get rid of your beautiful design. But the benefit is that, that just means you get to create a new one. In the next video, I'm going to tell you all about your class project. See you soon. 13. Class Project: For your class project, I want you to create your very own piece of seasonal hand lettered chalk art. Like I said, the great thing about chalk is that it's easily changed. So let's take advantage of that. In my own home. This is what I do with my boards. I change it up with the seasons and for birthdays. And honestly, I have a lot of fun doing it, plus my two girls love it. So whatever season it is right now, make a board celebrating it. Use a quote or something funny. Something like this for summer, fall, winter, and spring. And you can't forget holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July. You get the picture. How fun with it. Share photos of your process and the class projects section. And of course, share a pic of your final piece. If you're on the gram, give me a tag at hoopla letters. That way I can share your fabulous work with all of my followers too. I can't wait to see what you come up with. 14. Wrap Up: And that's it. I wanted to thank you all for joining me in class today. I hope that you now love chalk art as much as I do. If you enjoyed this class, please rate and review. It, just takes a few clicks and it's a huge help. Also, be sure to check out my other courses here on Skillshare. Thanks again and as always, happy scripting.