Scratchboard.

Artist Statement. 

This peice of artwork was inspired by trying to realistically scratch a photo onto scratchboard. I chose this image of my dog because I saw the prominent highlights and thought they would look great on scratchboard. I also love the big smile she is giving; which provided a lot of opportunity to experiment with the scratchboard technique such as her teeth and the bubbles in her mouth. 

To create this piece, I used scratchboard, a scratch-tool, a reference photo, and a pencil. 

To start, I gridded my reference photo and my scratchboard with a pencil. I chose to grid because I had used this technique in the past with the charcoal and self portrait projects; and found that it helped me with proportions and details. Then, I used the tool to scratch away the highlights square by square. The hardest part was when I got to the right side of my dog's face. The sun was on the left side, so the right side had virtually no highlights and it was difficult to see detail since my dog is a black lab. I ended up using small details that showed up near the edge- where the background connected. This helped it look more complete even though a lot of the right side was left black. The final step was the collar, where I crosshatched to make a solid color.