The Center of the Anomaly

The Butterfly April 26, 2006

Here’s a more recent work.  This project was an largely an exercise in scratchboard technique since I hadn’t done one in a while.  It turned out pretty good.  In fact, I liked it so much I did another one as a mirror image and added color – yellow & red. 

Meet the Mistress April 23, 2006

Hello!  How about some art-blogging!

I did this piece sometime in 1993. The title is “The Mistress of the Void”.   I did it on a medium called scratchboard (or scraperboard as the Brits prefer).  Scratchboard is a very fussy and unforgiving medium, so not many people mess with it, but when it’s done well the results can be quite spectacular.

This brand of scratchboard (Essdee) is high quality poster board with a thin, hard layer of white clay pressed onto it and a layer of high quality India ink on top of that.  The idea is to scratch the ink with a stylus and reveal the white clay underneath.  This makes for very nice high-contrast images.  

It’s very fussy in that if you bend it too much it the clay will crack.  Also, you can never touch the surface of the panel with your hands since the ink absorbs oil from your skin and it will show up.  There’s nothing like a big, fat thumb print to mar a nice piece that you’ve worked on for a couple hundred hours.  It’s unforgiving in that if you make a mistake it’s virtually impossible to correct it without it being very noticeable that you re-inked an area that you scratched.  Still, it’s probably my favorite medium precisely because few other artists use it.  I did this piece largely using the pointillist method.  Thousands and thousands of tiny dots.  All done by hand.  It took a long time, but the effect was worth it.  There’s a long story behind the image, perhaps I’ll write about it later, but for now enjoy it and let me know what you think.