Sgraffito

There was a specific show that I have watched countless times that sort of inspired me to create this work and helped me figure out what I wanted the subject to be. Within Avatar the Last Airbender, there is a scene where koi fish are swirling around in a pool of water, and are supposed to represent yin and yang, push and pull. For this project, I was inspired to create those fish in a style that would be my own and would be separate from that on the show. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do koi fish for this project, as it was the first idea that popped into my head, and after knowing that I wanted the subject to be koi fish I simply went from there and ended up thinking of the fish from the show. This is the main idea behind my artwork, it relates to my life because this was something that I wanted to do, and something that I seemed to think of right away. I also knew I wanted to use a circular shaped sgraffito board specifically so that I could make the fish circling each other the main focus of the piece. With my work, I was really just trying to represent these fish from a show I had grown up with, and relate it to something very close to me. I was also figuring something out style wise. I was figuring out what style I would draw these fish in, and I figured out a style that I enjoyed to sketch (although it was less enjoyable to carve into the clay or scratch off on scratchboard). I may even continue to TRY this style more when it comes to different sketches in the future.

This project began with a sketch, which I simply did on drawing paper with pencil. When it moved to scratchboard, the tool that I used was the simple red one, as I knew that all I needed to do was scratch out the lines of my sketch. This gave me an idea/feel for how scratching/carving into the clay would feel. It was sort of nerve wracking due to the fact that I could not erase or go back in any way. When I am making something, I am very comfortable with using sketchy lines, and I’m very comfortable knowing that I can erase, so things like this can sort of be a little outside of my comfort zone. When making my scratchboard, I made the first fish that I drew in a way that I enjoyed, but ended up messing up a bit on the second fish. This led me to believe that maybe that specific fish would be harder to capture without being able to erase/do sketchy and thin lines. For the clay I mostly used a wooden tool with a small ball at the end, allowing me to trace out my lines pretty clearly. This time, I made the second fish better than I had on the scratchboard but it still wasn’t to my satisfaction. I was also worried because I knew I had to carve this one out in order to make it a white color, and I wasn’t sure how I could trace out the details that I wanted to die. To carve out my project I used a larger tool, in order to get MORE of the clay out at once.

The sketch was really the part where I was trying out different styles, knowing that I did not want to get realistic with something like this. I found one that I enjoyed pretty quickly, and overall the sketch is probably the thing that I am most proud of. I was a bit worried with how this would transfer to paper, but I moved on anyway. The scratchboard was a part where I found myself getting sort of frustrated. I didn’t enjoy how it looked or felt to do my project on it, but I persevered anyway because I was at least happy with half of my scratchboard and knew what I had to do differently on the final project because of it. Overall, throughout this process I didn’t really revise my work/idea at all. I kept the same consistent idea throughout the whole thing, knowing what I wanted to do and pursuing that right away. The experimenting was really only done with the style in my initial sketch as it wasn’t something that I had done before. In the future I don’t think I plan to continue using sgraffito, but I can still experiment with different styles as I did with this project.