Scratch Art

For today's lesson, we made scratch art. We started the lesson by coloring a piece of paper in either primary or secondary colors, making whatever patterns we wanted to as long as they covered our whole paper in color. We then painted over the paper in black, making sure no color peeked through. While we were waiting for the paint to dry, we viewed a powerpoint detailing a scratch artist's process and work. We saw how they used textures and patterns to make their work more detailed and realistic. Following this, we were given small strips of actual scratch paper to practice creating our own patterns on. Upon completion of that, we took a thin piece of paper the same size as a our painted piece of paper and drew a landscape on it, trying to use things that we could incorporate patterns into. We then covered the entire opposite side in pencil graphite, so that we could transfer our design to our painted paper. When our paint was dry, we traced our original design so that the graphite coating the other side of the paper pressed down onto the painted paper, transferring our design. All that was left to do was scratch off the black paint to trace over our now transferred design, then adding patterns. My landscape was a volcano island scene, complete with a beach, water, a palm tree, trees, and clouds. I thought using a variety of things would help give me more options when it came to filling in my patterns.

I think an interesting extension project for this project would be to incorporate the entire color wheel, rather than just primary or secondary colors. Students could color in a complete color wheel (or a square) on their paper, so that when they scratched off the black paint later on, all the colors of the rainbow shown through. This would be a good way to get younger students to fill their entire paper with design, as well.