Scratchboard

Artist Statement

The main idea that guided this artwork was to create a scratchboard piece of my new puppy. Scratchboard is like drawing but instead of adding shading you are engraving highlights. I picked to do my dog for this artwork because my puppy is new to my house and I love a lot. His name is bauer and has the same color eyes as me. I tried to mainly focus on the fur on his body. I thought making sure all the fur was perfect would bring the drawing together a lot.

To create this art I used scratchboard and scratchboard tools. My favorite tool was this tool that looked like a calligraphy pen tip. This took aloud me to make many different types of marks and add detail easy. My first step to this art was to print my picture in black and white. To do this I changed the white and dark value in the picture to make it have highlights and shadows. Next I printed my image and graphite transferred it to the scratchboard. This allowed me to have a light outline making it easy to follow. After this I started to scratch starting with my background. I focused on the dog mainly second and the couch last. This allowed for it to look like the dog was on the couch.

The main problem I faced was getting used to this technique. This took some getting used to because you are adding highlights instead of dark. I overcame this by starting with light scratches and advancing to bigger and more complex areas allowing for me to slowing gain skill as I get to harder areas resulting in a good art piece.