Chalk Hack 101

Happy weekend friends! Over quarantine in 2020 our family found ways to keep ourselves busy and be outdoors as much as possible! We ended up falling in love with chalk art! We ordered a handful of boxes from Amazon, you can find it here, and we got to work on getting creative on our driveway.

It was so fun! Our first piece was for our boy's birthdays! It was super cute and didn't take too long to complete! Since our amazing nanny (we call her Laney) was living with us at the time we would get these done pretty quick. I do free hand the drawings the best I can with a white outline and then we paint it in.

This was before we learned about mixing the chalk with water. You can see a lot of blank spaces and it isn't quite as bold.

I am sure there are easier ways to make this chalk paint but we have found this works best for us. We break up the chalk best we can, I was grinding it in the Ninja but I realized it was leaving a lot of residue and wasting chalk. So I smash it with a hammer in a bag and we put it in a Mason jar with some water. We have noticed that each color needs a different amount of water to chalk ratio. There is really no perfect formula we have found just yet. Ours has been a watercolor consistency for the most part, we add chalk or water as we go. The chalk goes a really long way when painting. It's not dusty, won't smear or get tracked everywhere when you walk on it. We also wet the driveway first and paint when its damp, this makes it nice and bold!

Painting


Painting on the chalk made for more bold colors, we would mix chalk colors to create other tones also. We bought some cheap paint brushes from Amazon and we would re-use those until they went out on us. Small rollers worked well for the bigger surface areas we covered. Chalk is such a fun way to get your kids outside, I am no artist but it is so much fun spending tie together and creating something even the neighborhood can enjoy.

Stretch your Chalk


So, my biggest tip is if you have little ones who are always breaking their chalk...make chalk paint! It will last longer, be more bold & it really helps them with painting in the lines if you outline something for them to color in! We did end up buying these plastic containers because....kids drop things. We also did try using holly powder, it works great but smells awful mixed with water and stains hands (especially the red) So If you want to keep the kids clean stick with chalk!