chalkboard art of Mt. Fuji created by 2 students at Mito Sakuranomaki High School in Ibaraki | click images to enlarge
Over the past 2-3 years there’s been an increasingly popular trend amongst students in Japan. Taking advantage of their drawing skills, classroom facilities and, most importantly, some downtime in-between classes, students have been creating immense artworks on classroom chalkboards using nothing but the chalk provided to them, assumingly leftover from the previous lesson. The pictures often get posted to social media and go viral. Amongst the many eyeballs that noticed the works was Japanese chalkboard maker Nichigaku.
the top prize went to 2 students from Kochi Nishi Senior High School who created this chalkboard mural of their favorite extracurricular activities.
Despite a secular trend towards digital classrooms, the majority of teaching in Japan still gets done on a chalkboard. And in order to promote the value of a good ‘ol traditional chalkboard, Nichigaku decided to call for submissions and host a Blackboard Art contest. The call for entries earlier this year yielded 50 entries from 249 students. And the results were just announced earlier this year. Nichigaku awarded winners with gift certificates of up to 100,000 yen in value.
Earlier this year another chalkboard artist made the news. After twitter user Rena Rena posted stunning images of a Frozen-inspired chalk mural, she was commissioned to create the cover art for a book by a Japanese novelist.
2nd place went to this mural created by 4 students at Omiya Koryo High School who depicted a mirror image of what happens while the teacher has his back turned.
You can see all of the 50 entries right here.
Honorable mention went to 5 students from NSG-Highschool Niiza Saitama who created this monotone mural of crossroads.
Honorable mention went to 6 students from Tokyo Metropolitan Sogo-Koka High School who created a surreal landscape using miniature, repeated kanji character.
