Scratchboard

I took this photo out in the woods with River when I was hiking with her and I really liked it when I took it. I thought it would make a good photo to use for this project because it translated really well to greyscale. I like this photo because it is looking down at River in a 'front' between my legs with snow as a backdrop and her leash next to the camera lens. This photo shows a lot of what it's normally like for me in the woods with River so I liked using it for this project.

I used scratchboard for this project and in the first sections I was still figuring out how I wanted it all to look and you can tell, but by the end I was pretty happy with how it came out looking. I think scratchboard was a good medium for this photo, but I still would have preferred to do it in graphite or charcoal or something.

At first I was struggling with focusing on negative space instead of what I would normally do with positive space when working with something like charcoal, and I kept putting lines in the wrong places because of that. Once I started to get used to the scratchboard a bit more I got better about where I was putting my lines, but I still made some smaller mistakes because of muscle memory about how to draw in the lines I wanted. I had a second piece of scratchboard with me that I was using as a test piece for most of the project and that helped quite a bit with testing methods. I experimented a lot on both that piece and in the actual final piece and I think that helped a lot with figuring out scratchboard.