Chalk Art Manga: A Step-by-Step Guide

By Danica Davidson and Rena Saiya

Two favorite art forms are together at last! Chalk art is beloved by both kids and adults, and manga is a worldwide comic book phenomenon coming from Japan. As the first book of its kind, Chalk Art Manga not only reveals the secrets to creating cute and fun manga characters in chalk, but it also shows you everything step-by-step to make it extra easy. Characters can leap out of the pages of manga and come to life under your own fingers as you draw kawaii foods that look too adorable to eat, colorful chibi people, exciting animals and monsters, and more. Just like that, your driveway, sidewalk, or chalkboard can become a canvas for vibrant and exciting manga artwork as you learn to draw, pick colors, and smudge for effect. Created by two manga experts, author/journalist Danica Davidson and manga creator/artist Rena Saiya, Chalk Art Manga is fun for the whole family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781510771901

Book preview

Chalk and manga are two beloved forms of art, and now they’re together at last. Many kids (and adults!) love to pull out some chalk and make pictures on their driveway or sidewalk. There’s nothing quite like turning your driveway into a work of art on a sunny day. Even though the chalk will soon disappear, making this kind of art is soothing and unique, and it can still be captured forever by photography. The stress of achieving perfection—like with pen art—evaporates by wiping or washing away any errors.

Manga are Japanese comic books, and they’re popular all around the world. Many of them are then turned into anime, or Japanese animation. In Japan everyone from kids to elderly people read manga, and its popularity continues to spread. Manga are popular for their eye-catching artwork, their thrilling stories, and their relatable characters. Traditionally, manga has been made with pen and paper, and more recently many people create manga on their computer or tablet. In this book, we will concentrate on the art side of manga characters as opposed to the storytelling. Whether you’re doing a simple drawing on your sidewalk or doing advanced manga characters for onlookers at an anime convention, you have the tools and know-how to bring these characters to life!

How to Work with Chalk

In this book we’re going to concentrate on how to work with chalk on outside surfaces. (Please first make sure you have permission to work on particular sidewalks. And please don’t draw in the street, where it can be dangerous!)

Note: We’ll let you know the original size of each artwork in case that’s helpful as a reference, but you don’t have to copy the size. This sample drawing of a heart, below, is three inches wide and three inches high.

While some aspects may be tweaked, we are going to do all the drawings with the following general steps:

Step 1: Draft using white chalk. Take a piece of white chalk to draw the outline of the shape or character you’re going to make. In this case, we’re making a heart.

Step 2: Pick the chalk color(s) you want. In this book we’ll be showing you specific colors for each drawing, but always feel free to use whatever colors you want. If you’re not sure what colors to use, you can follow our color choices. It can be helpful to first trace the color on the inside of the white line before coloring it in, because it keeps you from coloring too far. However, you can also wait until after the next step to trace inside the outline. So here you can see an outline of pink on the inside of the white line.

Step 3: Next, fill in the drawing with the chalk. It’s better to use the chalk in straight, back-and-forth lines instead of coloring randomly. See the next heart picture for how this looks completed. To see what we mean by back-and-forth lines, check out How to Color with Chalk on page xiv.

Step 4: Smudge the chalk. Put your finger into the chalk and move it around to smooth it out. Not only does smudging take away patchy looks that might appear in pavement, but it can also help you blend colors. Smudging can make your artwork look really fancy and smooth! If you don’t want to get your fingers dirty, you can wear gloves to smudge. You also don’t have to smudge if you don’t want to, but it will help make your picture pop, and we will be using the smudging process in all our examples.

Step 5. After you smudge, you might want to add a little more color if there’s not enough. When you work on an uneven surface, the chalk might be thinner in some places than others. Here’s where you can easily fix that. After that, you can smudge again if needed.

Step 6: After you’re done smudging, draw black lines over the original white lines. This helps bring out the picture more and also makes it look more like manga, because manga characters are outlined in black.

Step 7: As the final step, you can add some white chalk in specific locations to get a shiny look. For example, you can put some white in a person’s hair to make it look as if it’s shining in the sun. With this heart, you can see where to put white lines first on the left side, then on the right side.

And with those steps, you will have your chalk art! Feel free to follow exactly as we show the steps, or just use the steps as a springboard for you to get creative and try new things if you want to.

We start with