For this project, we had to create a realistic scratchboard image for a photo that we took and we had to make a scratchboard value strip. In this piece, I chose the subject of the water by my friend's house because I spend a lot of time there during the summer. I tried to show the movement and patterns of the water and the way the sun was setting. I choose to leave a few things completely black because it showed the darkness and the shadows that were cast on certain things.

This was made by me first selecting a photo that I wanted to use, I found this one in my camera roll from the previous fall. After I chose my photo I converted it to black and white so that I could get different values. I had to do some light editing to get a good amount of whites, grays, and blacks. Once I had this done I printed out my photo, at this point, I had to start grinding my scratchboard and my image so that I'd be able to transfer the image through scratches. Once everything was ready to transfer over I started scratching square by square so that it looked as close to the real image as possible. I used this red-handled tool for a good portion of this project and for the rest of it I used the fiberglass tool because it was good with shading. After I scratched everything I wanted I was done for the most part other than a few little spots that I was able to fix with some ink. The value strip was a pretty easy process, all I did was use the red-handled tool to make some squiggles and once I needed more I started to use the three-pronged tool to add more faster.

In the beginning, I had to change certain values of my image so that I could get plenty of details while keeping plenty of different values. The value strip was kind of like a practice piece but I also used extra scrap pieces of scratchboard to practice different techniques before using them on my final piece. I did make a handful of mistakes along the way of making this so I fixed them by adding some black Indian ink and scratching away what I wanted to be white or gray. I definitely tried out different tools to see what I liked but I was the most comfortable with the red-handled tool and the fiberglass tool. I definitely struggle with trying to make the grays and I'm not super proud of my final piece, if I were to do it again I'd like to hone in the skills of making grays and softer transitions. As for the value strip, there wasn't a huge process the only thing was I had to make two because I was going to do a sunset but I didn't like the way it was coming out so I changed it to just the waves.