Chalk wall canvas - "Mountain Landscape"

Here is a fun way to transform a boring old concrete wall into a canvas for your permaculture imagination!

What you need for this project:

A boring old concrete wall *Bonus points* Extra points if your wall is covered in lichen!

A wire brush (stainless steel scouring pads also work)

Blackboard paint, and primer if appropriate

Colorful chalk and/or chalk pens

Normally, when I think of blackboards, these words come to mind: flat, rectangle, black and white, inside, schoolwork.  Let's challenge that concept with a landscape wall blackboard canvas!  

By scrubbing and cleaning only select portions of the wall, and painting only select areas, neat features and contrasts begin to take form.  Microscopic lichen, with a little imagination, can become a misty mountain calling, or the shading of a rock-cratered moon.  Scrubbed areas become a snowy field or grain-filled plain.

Blackboard-painted areas then transform into an evening sky, or the darkest depths of space.  Kids of all ages can fill them up with zeppelins and space craft via colorful chalk. And the shape is up to you!  Perhaps you will use blackboard painted areas to create underground "burrows" for desert fox dens, or branching underground networks for ants tunneling with cooling mounds poking up above a dry savannah? Perhaps you will venture underwater, where no sunlight reaches, and life is sustained on hydrogen-sulfide spewing volcanoes!   Or maybe you will not make a landscape, but rather will paint the blackboard area in the shape of a person, where kids can practice drawing and learning about all the complex life within the systems of their own growing bodies?  Or they can draw outfits of "what they want to be" when they grow up.  So don't let that concrete urban wall be wasted in static and profane graffiti or blank nothingness, because instead it can be filled with the imaginations of all!