Thursday, July 12, 2012

A Scritchy Scratchback Success!

We had a lovely day yesterday with two groups of kids at Gasworks Arts Park doing scratchback workshops - what a talented bunch!

Here's one way to create scratchback artworks if you would like to try these at home. *And please feel free to comment on this post if you have other tried and tested recipes!

Materials: A4 or A3 paper, oil pastels, black acrylic paint, a scratching instrument like scissors

How to:

- Practice the design (in ours they used reference material about animals to practice drawing characters/creatures)
- Make sketches for the design using your drawings as inspiration
- Cover all of a new sheet of white (cartridge) paper with a good coating of oil pastel (pretty dense)
- Either:
- Paint whole surface with black acrylic paint
- or
- Only paint your creature as a silhouette onto the surface
- Then... leave it to dry
- Using a sharp instrument, scratch through the black paint to create patterns or lines that bring through the colours of the oil pastels below!

Enjoy! And remember it takes a bit of practice but once you've got the hang of it this style of artwork can be beautiful!






Scrathback in action!


An example where the silhouette of the creature was painted on in black and then scratchback was used to create texture and pattern. 

This is an example of where the entire page was covered in black paint and the shape of the creature was scratched out. 









2 comments:

  1. Delightful drawings

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  2. So great seeing photos of these young artists creating. I live in Sydney but will love to visit Gasworks Arts Park with my kids next time I'm in Melbourne.

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