Realistic Scratchboard

Artist Statement

This piece came out of a picture of me and my small brother. I really like this picture because I think it's nice and sweet. This picture represents me and my brother and our family, therefore, I think it's cool that I can draw this on scratchboard. It's a good opportunity to try and work with scratchboard since I haven't done it before, and it was a fun time when I was doing it.

I began the scratching with a black and white picture, and I gridded it onto the scratchboard I'm planning to do my art one. I also used some scratching tools to scratch, as an example, I've tried to use a needle to make the texture.

To start the piece, I measured my picture and gridded it into one-inch squares. Then I drew the same sized grid onto my scratchboard, making it the same size as my picture. I began scratching on the top right corner then went row by row. One thing that I find difficult about doing scratchboard is that it's difficult to get the texture that you want, it would look different than what you expect it to look like. Since my picture includes a lot of gray tones, I ran into many difficulties in getting the correct tone; because that scratchboard is either white or black, I have to scratch lightly to get the "gray".