Scratch and Draw

When you think of drawing, you usually think of adding pencil, charcoal, pastel or other media "onto" the surface of paper. But, have you ever thought about trying the opposite? Scratchboard is a great reverse of the old rule of adding to the surface because, with scratch work, you remove the surface to create an image.

Scratchboards come in a variety of different types. Traditionally, the surface is black and the paper beneath the black surface is white. This means that you remove the dark surface to expose the white under it. Scratching more of the black inked surface away will yield whiter, lighter areas. The boards are easily cut to size with scissors.

New scratchboard products include bright colors of red, blue and green under the black ink top coat. The very newest scratchboards have splashes of rainbow colors under the ink top coat. Plus there are metallic colors, too. When you scratch the ink coating from these sheets, you expose glitter and sparkle. These are great for any celestial or supernatural drawings or just for fun.

One artists' quality scratchboard type of product is available (from Ampersand) that consists of a super-smooth clay surface with a coating of high quality ink over Masonite. Scratching through the ink and into the clay surface allows superb control of the amount of light or dark in the drawing because you can balance between the extreme black and chalk white to create simulated shades of gray. The only way to achieve gray with traditional scratchboards is to mingle pure dark and pure light close enough together to fool the eye into believing gray is present.

The tool used to scratch away the coating on any of these papers can be as simple as a sharpened stick or as sophisticated as a special scoring tool. Pushpins and tapestry needles make excellent tools for scratching fine detail work. Young adults can carefully use knife blades or any other pointed metal object to create patterns in the black surface. There is a tool designed especially for scratchboard. It is styled like a tiny trowel with a pencil-type handle. This instrument is sold wherever scratchboard material is available.

Here's an easy exercise to learn how to create different tones of "gray." Use a sheet of simple, black-on-white scratchboard material. Pencil in 6 to 8 two-inch squares in a row. Within the squares, crosshatch (crisscross scratches) to create a progression, exposing more and more of the white as you work from left to right. This simple exercise will help you learn different ways to create the degrees of light and dark needed to make a drawing come to life. Great fun!