Advice On Painting Your Shelves With Chalkboard Paint

As many of you may or may not know, I painted my shelves in chalkboard paint.  It is probably my favorite thing about my shelves.  So I thought I would give advice for anyone who wanted to do this as well.  So I'll break this up into some helpful sections (or at least I hope it is helpful).

What you'll need
Well the first thing you'll need is chalkboard paint.  I bought the Disney brand of chalkboard paint (which you can't get anymore).  I found it at my local Walmart.  I have two bits of advice.  My shelves are about six feet high and three feet wide.  It only took on 32 fluid ounce paint can to paint two coats on my shelves, and I have two shelves to give you a bit of guidance of how much paint to buy.  The second is if you don't want the black color of a chalkboard get untinted chalkboard paint.  My shelves are originally white, and since I had untinted paint, they stayed white.  Now this happened purely by accident for me, but it was a happy accident.

The next thing you'll need are paint brushes and a paint tray, and while I'm sure you figured this out all on your own I do have some advice.  Now any old paint tray will do, but your brushes are important.  I would highly recommend a roller especially if you are doing the outside of your shelves.  However you will need a brush, if you paint the inside to get the corners, which was something I had overlooked.

The last thing you'll need is chalk or chalkboard markers.  Now I prefer chalkboard markers, but they are definitely more expensive.  However if you want it to look like paint then I would highly recommend the markers.  You can get them on Amazon for a relatively nice price.  However I've been buying them at Michaels because I've had an emergency need for chalkboard markers.  Now this is the brand I get.  While they are expensive, Michaels almost always has coupons so they aren't as expensive.  With the chalkboard paint that I used it needed to cure for a week, so I would recommend ordering them from Amazon.  I bought this brand from Amazon, but I don't know how well they work since I haven't used them yet.

These are all of the colors I had a few weeks ago.  I have bought some browns and tans since then, but they come in a variety of colors.










So this is what chalkboard markers look like if this is the look you want.

Some Advice
If you are drawing something big I would recommend doing it in pencil first.  I drew the Hogwarts castle, and I had to redo the whole thing.  Now that was also kind of my fault because I didn't see how high I wanted it, but I would still recommend drawing in pencil first because a lot of the colors don't come off very nicely.  I would also recommend paint that matches your shelves.  Thank goodness my shelves are white because I could get rid of some of my mistakes to make it look nice again especially with my castle.  Also have wet paper towels at all times for erasing.  I would also recommend a dry one so you can dry the surface when you're done.

If you want to know more about what I plan on doing with my shelves or why I wanted to paint them in chalkboard paint in the first place you can go watch this video.  If you want to do this please let me know, and if you have any questions feel free to ask!