When IOD announced that they were releasing erasable liquid chalk in COLORS, I thought, “How cool.  You can stamp in color.”  It did’t dawn on me that you could PAINT with them until I saw the Sunflower Stamp.  Mind blown!  I was ready to start painting with erasable liquid chalk!

As soon as my ELC arrived, I decided it was time to redo a chalkboard I’d stamped in White ELC a few months ago. I started off by washing off the old image.  A Mr. Clean Magic Eraser works great at removing the old image.  My chalkboard was painted in Fusion’s Ash so it was easy to remove the old design.  Once the chalkboard was prepped, I turned to my stamps and made sure to sand my new Sunflower stamp so it was ready for action.

I found a quote I loved and began to tape off the lines that would be my guide and lay out my letters.  I used the Typesetting, Swoosh, and Block Type (now retired) stamps for my letters.  Once one line was laid out, I used my Thin Mount to grab a word or two, ink them up, and stamp them on the line.

When I had a letter with a descender, I didn’t stamp it with the word but came back after I pulled the tape up and stamped in into place.

While I stamped the Typesetting letters together as a word, Swoosh is designed to stamp one letter at a time so that the letters connect.  I used a stamp pad to ink my stamps but a brayer works well, too. 

With the words stamped out I filled in the spaces with sunflowers and it was time to add some COLOR!  I just used a paper plate for my palate and the amazing Staalmeester Round #6 Artist Brush. It was perfect for this piece.  I started by mixing some yellow, red, and blue to get a brown and dabbed it in the center of my sunflowers.

Next, I mixed up some yellow and blue to get a few shades of green.  I found it helpful to have my brush slightly wet so the colors blended.  Painting the leaves and stems were fun.  I used the stamp lines as a guide and painted around them.

Finally it was time to to paint the sunflowers.  Sunflower petals are mostly yellow but I mixed up some orange to add shading and dimension.  Of course you can’t have flowers without bees.  I used the yellow and black erasable liquid chalk to dress him up.

I’m so surprised how fun and easy this was to do!  I don’t consider myself to be a fine artist but I think these sunflower look darn good!

So here’s the finished chalkboard.  I love the saying and think the sunflowers are perfect here.  Sunflowers are BIG this fall.  Are you decorating with them?

The IOD sisters created their own chalkboard.  You can read all about it here.