If you’ve never drawn on a scratchboard before, try it! You can do some pretty cool stuff with them. It’s also a great activity to do with kids.You can buy pre-made ones in the store, or you can be cheap like me and make your own. That is what you are looking at above. A home made scratchboard. And I’m going to tell you how I made it. Keep in mind that this is not my most successful home made scratchboard. This is something I do every once in a while, just because I like it. And in keeping with my self imposed rules of the Collage Sketchbook, I did this for fun and as an experiment.
In the past when I’ve made scratchboards I use a sturdy base, like Bristol board. I cover it in gesso, let that dry, then cover it in black ink and PRESTO! Scratchboard!
For this piece I didn’t reinforce the paper in the book except to paste old artwork and magazine cut outs in it. I then covered it with gesso and ink, as per the usual process. My hopes with this was that I could scratch through the ink and gesso down to the magazine and the colors would come through. That worked in some place, but not enough that I would recommend doing an entire piece this way. For the most part what I found was the glossy nature of the magazine paper did not react well to the gesso, and instead ripped.
If you’re interested in trying scratchboard for yourself check out this site which is full of good information. There is also this video, in which this guy uses a slightly different method than I do.