Scratchboard: Bog

Hi!  I finally found my way on to our blog and even all the way to my very own post!  I also finally finished the scratchboard assignment so I have something to write about.  First off, this whole Art Pandemonium thing has been so much fun and exciting and I’m going to try my hardest to catch up on posting the first couple assignments and keep up to date in the future.

When Katie pulled out the scratchboard she bought from her Wild Cat Sanctuary trip, I just wanted to stare at it for ages.  The level of detail and realism was incredible, and beyond being an interesting image, the cut marks and lines just drew me in.  I decided that’s what I love most about it: that you can’t make broad, sweeping strokes like you can with ink or paint or even pencil.  Nothing is soft.  (a couple tools can be, but I didn’t really use them).  Everything, every shade and tone and bend in the light is created essentially with hatchmarks, and they can be incredibly tiny because it’s just really easy to make the teensiest mark with a blade and a black board.

I didn’t really go that route with my image though.  I got into it and realized I was thinking very much like a printmaker, avoiding grey tones and sticking to pure black and white as if I were going to roll ink on it and send it through a press afterwards.  That was my first mistake.  My second, and probably my biggest, mistake was not planning the image out ahead of time.  I drew a REALLY rough sketch in pencil, then just jumped in with a knife.  My third mistake was choosing an image that was simply way too broad.  I didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with all the individual trees and branches and leaves; I think I liked it in the first place because of the skyline and didn’t think about how difficult the trees themselves were going to be until it was too late.

Now that I’ve got all my complaints out of the way, I will say that I like how it came out in the end.  I just had to embrace what I’d started (with periods of putting it away in frustration throughout) and simply finish it.  Now I can see that I like how some of the branches intersect with each other and sort of disappear at time, I like the figures at the bottom, and I like the trees on the skyline at the left.  I’d to try scratchboard again, probably a different image, and take the time in the beginning to plan it out properly.  Ah, well, I’m glad it’s done.