Walking around campus lately, students may have noticed something different about the ground. The sidewalks are coming alive with chalk designs. It is not out of the usual to walk down the street and notice a delicious looking slice of pizza, or to pass the Union and find a realistic drawing of Bruce Weber on the sidewalk.

Nate Baranowski and Adam Fabianski, both seniors in FAA, have turned chalking into a business. They call their business U of I Chalk.

“We founded it at the beginning of the semester,” Baranowski said. “Basically, I just saw the chalk around campus and I thought that I could do something like that. So I bought a tub of chalk and got started.”

Now they are getting up to 4 or 5 jobs a week. It took one big job for the business to really get going.

“The one piece that really did it for us was the Bruce Weber,” Fabianski said. “We were commissioned by Orange Krush to do a huge piece in front of the Union. It took us 4 or 5 hours, and after the Orange Krush guy sent along our contact info [to other businesses]. That’s where business started to pick up. More and more people have contacted us. That piece was pivotal.”

Baranowski and Fabianski work together to create their designs.

“I work with Nate and the people doing the commissioning” Fabianski said. “The design is not super hard. It takes about a half hour. We pull images off the internet.”

“We make it very personalized based on what the client wants,” Baranowski said. “If they want to design it themselves then we just copy it onto the chalk. We prefer if they send us pictures and we can figure it out from there. It’s a lot of graphic design, laying out text and different fonts and things like that. That’s why I have Adam. He knows a lot about font and he does a lot of that so that helps.”

The process of chalking the sidewalks is not without it’s challenges.

“With the actual chalking, it’s just getting the proportions down, making clean lines, and making sure the text lines up properly,” Fabianski said. “Perfecting the technique of working with a medium is the challenge.”

Students around campus are noticing the chalk designs.

“My friend and I went out of our way to look at the chalk designs,” said Shea Coughlin, sophomore in Education. “We were walking by it and we touched it. I thought it was paint at first.”

Coughlin also finds the chalk designs as an effective form of advertising.

“When people just write things on the quad I don’t really notice it, but when there’s art and a cool design with it, it really grabs my attention,” she said.

In addition to being a way to make money, doing the chalk designs is also something both students enjoy.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Fabianski said. “We’re entrepreneurs. We’ve learned a lot in a small amount of time on how to run a business. We’ve also met a lot of people from Gameday, WPGU and Memorial Stadium. It’s also been nice hanging out with Nate and sharing the experience with him.”

“We get paid for doing art,” Baranowski said. “It’s really enjoyable to get out there. I’m trying to push the envelope of what has ever been done here. I like looking back at it afterwards and seeing something unique.”