Looking Out To Sea

I had intended to write a long post about blackboards and such, but in the end decided no-one was really interested in my waffle. So instead I’ll just outline the process we used to make our own blackboards. Click through for the full details!

Materials

You will need:

• One cheap canvas for every blackboard you want to make.

  I bought the canvases we used from Au Naturale. Normally these things would be quite pricey, which was a surprise to me because they were pretty hideous. But I chose some particularly hideous ones that had been heavily discounted because no-one was buying them.

  In total I bought four canvases for less than ten pounds. The largest, 30” by 30”, cost me £4.

• Blackboard paint.

  Obviously you need enough to cover the canvases. After two coats of paint the colourful patterns no longer showed through, but continued applying layers to get a nice even matte finish.

  Helen also managed to find magnetic blackboard paint. If you build up the layers enough then it’s possible to create a surface that will hold lightweight magnets!

You’ll also want brushes or a foam roller and all the extras for painting — newspapers, dust sheets, something to clean up with and so on.

Process

We’re not pretending any expertise here. We went into this with no experience. We don’t know anyone who’s done this before. The idea was a synthesis of things mentioned by friends, and a home-brew painting called “Chocolate Vanilla Dreams” made by someone Helen knows. It just all fell into place one day after remembering about the rolling blackboards they used to have at school.

1. Lay out your dust sheets and canvases where they can be left to dry over at least a day. Our paint required 3 hours between coats so we left it all out on the living room floor overnight.

2. Start to paint. It seems delightfully destructive at first, to be painting over a genuine picture with thick black paint. We left the sides of the canvas bare (give or take some slips and spills) so that some of the underlying colour still remained.

3. Keep going with the coats, until you get a suitable texture. The resulting blackboards will be lightweight and easy to hang, as they’re mostly thin canvas and a light wooden frame.

The great thing about this technique is that you can choose a canvas in a variety of sizes. Have several of them and move them around. They hang just like pictures.

We haven’t solved the issue of how to store chalk and a duster. I have some ideas that I’m working on, so we’ll let you know.