Variety of mark making with Scratchboard

This post is not about how to do traditional scratchboard. For great scratchboard tutorials that will teach you to do the kind of photo-real linework you expect from scratchboard, check out http://www.scratchboard.org. This post is about how to use ink to achieve some more tonal, painterly, messy or expressive effects. This post is about how to weird up your scratch art.

I don't know what kind of ink you use. I use Sumi, 'cause i like the consistency and the thick satiny coverage, and, more importantly, it's what i had on my desk. What i'm about to describe would probably work with any water-soluable ink, but i know for sure it works with Sumi.

1. Line weight
Traditional scratchboard uses a sharp tool, often a stylus, to scratch lines of a consistent width into a layer of ink, revealing the clay underneath. Cool. But the stylus only gets you one width of line, yielding an etched, rapidograph look. Which is awesome if you want that, but by simply switching to a broader tool, like a #11 X-Acto blade, you can scrape away a larger area, giving you a variety of line widths from thin stylus to fat scrapey. Check it out:


Mix the fat scrapes with precise stylus values for a full range of precision and expressiveness. All your marks are pretty earthy, though, hard or gritty or scrapey. So how you gonna soften it a little?

2: Wet it up.
Use a wet brush to moisten an area and brush away the topmost layer of ink. While the clayboard feels pretty smooth, it's actually full of tiny pits and peaks. The ink will rub off the peaks first, giving you a sparkly, silty, soft-edged value shape. You can move the ink you just wiped off to another area, bringing down something that's too light or softening something that's too harsh. Be warned, though, ink's not all the water dissolves. A little of the clay comes with it, and the resultant mixture is slightly paler and more matte than the raw ink areas. If you're watching for it, you can use it to lighten areas without scratching them. If you're not watching for it it'll mess with your game, make areas read wrong. In my drawing it flattened an area that should have read as dimensional, and made dimensional another area that should have lain flat. If the clay effect troubles you, just brush matte medium over the offending area- that gives you a level playing field. You can still scratch through it, although your lines will be a little grittier. Not surprisingly, you can't use water to lift ink off a matte mediumed area.


You can also use water in the ink just like you would with wet-on-wet watercolor. Aces.

Dr. Ph. Martin's Radiant and Synchromatic Inks

So, my local art store stopped carrying Windsor Newton colored inks.

At first i felt betrayed, bewildered, other bewords, but it turned out to be a blessing. What they carry now is Dr. Ph. Martin's, which are bizzare and great. The first color i tried was "tobacco brown," a wheezy warm yellowish brown, and it was magnificently expressive worked wet-into-wet. Dark and warm when applied thick, it dilutes to yellow with very little water. Great fingering and variety of stroke on medium-absorbent paper. Another unexpected effect: "tobacco brown" is a blend of two pigments, a yellow and a purple, and the yellow (as might be expected, given the properties of earth colors and chemical colors) is way more soluble than the purple. This means that after you lay down a tone, you can flood the area with water or scrub it with a wet brush and lift away the yellow pigment, making the area shift warm. A little of this can be seen in the head of the hammer, above. I super wish you could see some of these drawings in person, 'cause it's crazy. A single ink can yield a temperature range that causes me to freak out with glee.

If a single ink can look like two inks, what can several inks do? I bought "van dyke brown" (a super warm brown, slightly pinker than burnt sienna) and "ultramarine blue" (a warm blue standby) and mixed the three in a bunch of proportions. Completely blown away by the range of colors possible; the range of base colors were not that surprising, given that i'm basically mixing red, yellow, and blue, but the pigment shifts that happened when water was added at various times were mad, calling blue out of magenta, yellow out of teal, pink and chartreuse out of indigo, like a tasteful earthtone rainbow. It's like a drawing rollercoaster! I want Dr. Ph. Martin to adopt me and take me to live in Martin Manor. You guys have got to try this.