Chalkboard Drawing Effect
Hand it a photograph and it comes back drawn in chalk on a black board — where the darkest thing in the picture is bare board, because chalk adds light and there is no way to draw a dark line. Two fields.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: a white teapot on a green board and a portrait on a black one. The portrait is the harder test, because a face has no bare shadow side to leave alone.
Nothing in the drawing is darker than the board itself: the dark areas are bare board and everything else is light added in chalk, with the grain and old wipe marks showing underneath. In the portrait, the background and the shadow side of the head are simply not drawn. Sometimes a stick of chalk appears in a corner even though it is not wanted; it is easy to spot, so just generate again.
Generated for this library
Input
Bare board the background and the shadowed side of the
teapot are bare board, untouched
Board and a well-used dark green board, white chalk
chalk with one stick of pale yellow
Photograph teapot.png (1254 x 1254)
Returned 1 image · 1:1 · the teapot in chalk
darkest nothing in the drawing is darker than the
board: board floor 37, darkest point inside
the teapot also 37
range short and visibly so - the lit side of the
teapot and its brightest highlight are
nearly the same chalk
texture the board's grain breaks up every stroke,
and old wipe marks show through
mistake a stick of chalk is lying in the frame,
which the body forbids by name
words none, in any scriptYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1What in the picture is left as bare board
- 2The board and the chalk
Chalkboard Drawing Effect
What this makes
Hand it a photograph and it comes back drawn in chalk on a black board — where the darkest thing in the picture is bare board, because chalk adds light and there is no way to draw a dark line. Two fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach the photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. Name the bare areas by where they are in the picture.
- Look for a dark mark. Any line darker than the board means the run drew in ink and inverted it, which is the failure this template exists to stop.
- Check the board texture. If it is smooth everywhere, the chalk was painted on rather than dragged across a surface.
What you swap
- What in the picture is left as bare board
- the background and the shadowed side of the teapot are bare board, untouched
- The board and the chalk
- a well-used dark green board, white chalk with one stick of pale yellow
Before it runs
- A photograph, attached to the message, with a clear light side and a clear dark side. Chalk describes a subject by its lights, and a flatly lit thing gives it nothing to work with.
- A decision about what stays untouched. It is the first field and it is the composition: what you leave alone is what makes everything else read.
- Few colours. A box of chalk is a handful of sticks, and a picture asking for photographic colour will come back as a pastel painting instead.
- Acceptance that the range is short. Chalk cannot get much brighter than chalk, so a very bright highlight and a fairly bright midtone end up close together.
When to reach for it
When something should look explained rather than rendered: a menu, a title card, a diagram, a shop board, a lecture slide. Templates in this genre ask for a chalkboard style and hand back white lines on a dark background — a negative of an ordinary drawing, with shading that no stick of chalk could make.
What changes
- One photograph in, one chalk drawing out — worked from the dark upwards.
- The darkest thing in the picture is untouched board, because chalk cannot make anything darker.
- Tone is built by how much chalk is laid down and how hard, which is a limited range that runs out.
- The board's own texture shows through everywhere the chalk is thin, which is most of it.
- One image, no type, no frame, no wooden border, no eraser dust as decoration.
Pairs with
- Backlit Silhouette EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back as a cut silhouette lit from behind — no interior anywhere, so every part that has to be recognised must reach the edge and show itself against the light. Two fields.
- Contour Line DrawingHand it a photograph and it comes back as contour lines — every line a closed loop at one depth, none of them crossing, none of them stopping in mid-air, with the spacing doing all the shading. Two fields.
- Customer Snapshot EffectHand it a clean product photograph and it takes the picture again as a customer would — wrong light, off-centre, a real room behind it — with the product itself unchanged. Two fields.