Scratchboard

For this project I wanted to capture the image in the most realistic way that I could, while strictly highlighting the parts of the animal that the sun was shining on. This is one of the first times that I felt like a realistic work actually turned out in a way that I was satisfied with. I took these pictures of my cat at a time of the day where the sun was shining on her rather perfectly. I enjoyed how the pictures turned out, and chose my favorite out of the pictures that I took to do for this project. In the photo, there are large parts of my cat that are in the shade, this makes those specific parts harder to see, while the parts in the sun were very bright and very clear. Therefor, I tried to use ideas of highlighting strictly the parts in the sun. This project relates my life, more obviously, because it is my cat. Whenever we do realistic/gridding things I always want to do pictures of my cat, but before this I never really had any good ones to use. My cat is an important part of my life because a while back we adopted a kitten for the first time, but the kitten ended up having inherited a genetic disease, and she died still only after a month or so of having her. The cat we have now is the one I got after that, and she is a large part of my life. It took a long time to complete this piece, but in the end I do believe that it was worth it because of the fact that I was actually satisfied with my work.

This project was made purely using scratchboard, a material I hadn’t really used before. At first I found this material very difficult to use, I wasn’t sure how to really get realistic values that weren’t either pure black or pure white, however after a bit I did get used to using the material. The specific tool that I liked to use the most was the wooden tool with the many different metal pieces on the tool. I liked using this tool the most because it made multiple skinny lines at once, and because of this it was EXTREMELY helpful in making the fur of the cat and definitely was something that allowed my piece to look a lot more realistic. Another tool that I liked to use was the fiber brush, I used this mainly for the more white parts of the piece such as the chest and other white markings on my cat. Those were definitely the brightest parts of the piece, the sun made those specific parts of the animal very bright, and so in the scratchboard I made those parts purely white. I didn’t use the red tool too much, because I felt like whenever I used that specific tool it felt like it was taking away TOO much at one time and felt like I was unable to get the values that I wanted. I also used ink in an attempt to cover up the pencil marks, it didn’t work how I expected but I am not too angry with the outcome.

I started off with a different photograph for this piece. The photograph I started with was a photo of a friends cat that I took, and while the photo was very cute, it didn’t have enough value to it even after editing. It was too fuzzy, and the position that the cat was in was too difficult for me to actually capture. When I got home after the first day, I saw my cat in the position she was in and started to take pictures of her, after that I decided to use those photos for my piece. After editing, and veen before editing, I could tell that the photo would work better for me. It was higher quality, so I could clearly see the direction the fur was going in, and it had more value. I was scared to make my first mark when starting over with the new scratchboard piece, I wanted to be satisfied with the subject, and scratchboard was definitely not something I was comfortable with yet. However, after testing different tools and founding the one I liked the most, the piece slowly but surely started to come together. I was pretty surprised with how much I ended up liking it, and overall was just satisfied with the outcome. My next steps could be to KEEP using scratchboard, it was something that I ended up enjoying and am now at least sorta comfortable with.