Sgraffito

I was struggling to come up with a design for this project, and originally didn't want to do yet another project featuring River as the subject. With that said, I went back and decided to do River anyway because I didn't like any of my other design ideas. I made this one a bit different than the last projects because I didn't make River as realistic as I normally like to. It was harder to not make her more detailed, but sgraffito doesn't really lend itself too well to detail so overall I kind of like the almost cartoony look that this project ended up with.

I used clay with a coat of black glaze on it that had already dried out, and I used a metal tool to scratch off the black glaze to create negative space. I tried to keep the black/white ratio ~50/50 and I think I succeeded in that. I liked using the clay for this project because it has a more finished look at the end than the scratchboard did, but I didn't like how the lines always seemed to end up too thick or too thin. I still prefer charcoal or graphite drawings for something greyscale than any of the materials we have been using.

I started with paper and pencil and traced my clay slab on that. I went through a couple of designs before I found the one I wanted and all of those were done in paper and pencil. Once I settled on that I finished a very rough draft of the design in pencil before making a second version on scratchboard. The scratchboard draft took a lot more time than the paper draft and I focused a lot more on negative space and how I wanted negative space to look on the final piece. Once I felt pretty confident with not only the design but how I wanted to set it up on the clay, I started on the slab. I struggled a bit getting started with the amount of pressure necessary for scratching the slab but in the end I like how it turned out. I spent a lot of time throughout all of this looking at the details of the image I was using to try and get the slab both as accurate as possible and in some ways inaccurate. I didn't want to try and get every detail because it just doesn't really work with a clay slab, so I had to find ways to get the look I wanted without going overboard.