How to Make a Sidewalk Chalk Mural

Are your students inspired by big murals on the sides of buildings? While that would be an awesome student art project, it may not be a realistic goal when you take into account permits and all the logistics. As an alternative, you might consider a sidewalk chalk mural.

Our homeschool group is working on a service-learning project to promote tree awareness and conservation. When the idea for a building mural was proposed, we made it work as a sidewalk chalk project instead. It’s certainly not as permanent as a building mural, but the students very much enjoyed the process and what they created.

November is not your typical month to tackle sidewalk chalk art. The weather’s been dry though and, while it was rather chilly, at least we weren’t baking in the sun.

A mom in our homeschool group, Anya Kopotilova, is an illustrator and volunteered to come up with some ideas for our students. She created several for the students to choose from – a generous donation of her time and talents.

Here’s the final version of the illustration they chose:

Below is the process we used for this mural.

Materials List

Cornstarch (about 2 pounds for our 7 x 3.5 foot mural)
Food Dye in assorted colors
Water
Craft sticks or something to mix your cornstarch chalk paint
Sponge brushes (these worked surprisingly well to make the base coat, although they would probably get torn up on really rough concrete and a small roller might work better)
Paint brushes (the ones we used were an assortment of 3/4″-ish flat and round)
Sidewalk chalk
Chalk pastels

Instructions

Mix cornstarch and water in 1:1 ratio. We used a 1/2 C of each. Add food coloring. (See note below on the potential to stain concrete.)

Paint your background color. The liquid chalk paint dries fairly quickly and you can paint another color over it without the two blending together. We painted our background light blue for the sky, then did the trees and ground in brown, green, and white (for snow).

The leaves on the trees were a combo of our homemade liquid chalk paint and regular sidewalk chalk.

Animals, birdfeeders, and accents (like bark) were made with sidewalk chalk.

Lettering and additional accents were done with chalk pastels.

Division of Labor

The project took us about an hour and a half from start to finish. For our 7 x 3.5 foot mural, it worked well to have 12 students work in 3 groups of 4, scheduled at half-hour intervals. Of course there was some overlap, but the schedule allowed everyone to participate and have enough room to work.

Our schedule looked like this:

First group mixed the paints and painted the background, trees, and ground.
Second group painted leaves and drew animals.
Third group did lettering and added details and shading.

My only additional instruction would be this – If you put all the dirty paint containers, paint brushes, and food dye bottles in a bucket and put it in your minivan to take home and clean, make sure the bucket is in a secure position. Then if a light turns red and you have to stop quickly, the bucket will remain in an upright position.

I hope you try a sidewalk chalk mural sometime. We had a lot of fun with it (the project, not the minivan cleanup).

Q: Does the food dye stain concrete? A: Maybe.

I’ve read that if you use a lot of food dye, your liquid chalk paint might stain concrete. We did a test in my driveway. and the kids made the blue for the sky really dark (almost purple). It left a faint blue stain when we rinsed the mural off with a hose several days later. I think the sun will bleach it out. I’ve also been assured by my neighbor who does road work that there are products that easily remove stains like this. You could also potentially do a base coat that’s a concrete gray color and perhaps avoid the problem altogether. I’ll update this with more info once we see how our current mural does.

Followup: It did not stain the concrete in front of the library. 🙂

Materials List

Instructions

Division of Labor

Q: Does the food dye stain concrete? A: Maybe.

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