Faux Chalkboard Art

With Pinterest, Instagram, and the Internet in general, it's hard not to follow creative fads. Right now chalkboard art is *in*. I love typography and contrast, chalkboard art is the best of both those worlds. I haven't actually tried drawing on a chalkboard myself, though I intend to. What I have done is fake it on Photoshop.

Up until recently I've managed to snag the latest Student/Teacher Photoshop Creative Suites. Unfortunately I also switched from a Windows laptop to a Mac and Adobe's products aren't interchangeable. I would have had to spend at least $600 to get the Mac version of Photoshop on my new laptop. Bummer, I know.

After thinking it over, I decided to try out Photoshop Elements. It doesn't have as many bells and whistles, but digital art is a hobby and I thought I could handle less. It turns out I was right, for only $70 I can do pretty much everything I was able to do previously. In fact, I can do even more now because I'm still upgrading to a newer version.

All this to say, that you can do this tutorial, even if you have lesser software. I was actually surprised by how insanely easy it is to achieve this look!

In the past I have used fonts to do Photoshop chalkboard art. I still love fonts, it's a slight obsession of mine, but I found another way to get a more authentic look. I can't take credit either, Foolish Fire is where I found it first. 

Now, on to the tutorial. 

1. You need a chalkboard background. You can achieve this look anyway you like, taking a photo yourself, doing it on Photoshop, or the easiest way, which is to download one from somewhere like How to Nest for Less Blog.

2. Get out a good ol' piece of white paper, a pencil, an eraser (if you're like me), and draw to your hearts content. Sometimes I search through my font collection, browse www.dafont.com, or Pinterest to gather inspiration. 

3. Scan your image. 

 4. Open the scanned image into Photoshop.

5. Then simply invert the image by going to Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Invert. 

6. Click back to your main layer and make get ready to enhance it a bit. You can use layers or brightness/contrast by going to your Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Brightness/Contrast. In this case I used a brightness of -45 and contrast of +62. 

7. Now, you need to delete your solid black background. To do this you're going to use the magic eraser tool. Move the tolerance to 40 and *uncheck* sample all layers and contiguous. 

8. Flatten the image. Select your adjustment and main layers, then do Command + E. 

9. Drag your image to your chalkboard background. Annnd...

10. VOILA! Have fun!