Artist Statement

My scratchboard piece is a work based on a photo I took in New York City, on a field trip. I chose this photo because I liked the silhouettes on the rock, and the way the sun cast light on the stone. I thought that this photo was ideal for scratchboard, because of those two factors. I thought that the textures and range of values would be easy to capture with the materials I was using.

The base of this piece was scratchboard, and I used various scratching tools to recreate the photo. These included a blunt, wooden stick, a brush made for scratchboard, a finer scratching tool, and a several-pronged metal tool. In the beginning of the creation of this piece, I used graphite to grid the scratchboard and number the side and top.

The first thing I did was find my photo and print it. Then I gridded the photo with a black marker, dividing it up into 1 x 1" squares. I redid the same measuring system on the scratchboard. This method allows me to go square by square, focusing only on one square inch space at a time instead of the entire piece at once, which can be overwhelming. I started in the top left corner and made my way from left to right down the rows. I used a variety of tools, depending on what texture I was trying to achieve. I thought that the piece would be easy to create, but I found that the textures were harder to capture than I initially thought. The sky was also tricky, as on the photo it appeared as a subtle gradient, but on the scratchboard, which is a black surface, it proved harder to attain that smooth, directionless sky. I tried to follow the squares as much as I could, but I think my unfamiliarity with the materials led to some decisions that would have been different if I knew my tools better. For example, the tree on the right, I tried to do individual leaves with the finer scratching tool, but then also tried to go over with the metal prongs and create a different texture, neither of which looked like the photo. I think if I made this project again, I would try out my tools on a scrap piece before deciding which ones to use where. Overall, I'm happier with this piece than I was while creating it, and I think the grid method helped the most with that.