Scratchboard
- scraperboard
- scratch art
- sgraffito
White lines cut out of a solid black surface, so the drawing is made by removal.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Drawing by removal reverses every instinct: the page starts fully dark and every mark is light. Shadows are free and highlights are work, which is the opposite of drawing on paper and is why scratchboard pictures have such dense, confident blacks.
How it works
A board coated in black ink over white clay is cut with a sharp tool. Each cut exposes white. Tone comes from the spacing of the cuts: dense for pale, sparse for dark, none at all for full black. The tool catches slightly, so lines are a little ragged and small flecks appear where it skipped.
When to use it
Use it for natural history, labels, packaging and anything that should look engraved. Avoid it where colour or softness is needed, because it has neither.
Told apart from its neighbours
Patent Drawing hatches in black ink on white paper, which is the same tone logic inverted. Ink Wash builds value with dilution rather than with line. Screentone applies a printed sheet rather than cutting.
Where it is used
It carries a label, a book illustration, a packaging panel and any picture that should look like a nineteenth century engraving.
- Natural history and editorial illustration
- Book design, packaging and labels
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own character, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
<character> drawn on scratchboard, fine white lines cut out of a solid black ink surface so every mark removes rather than adds, tone built entirely from how close the scratched lines are to each other with dense hatching for mid grey and bare black for shadow, the lines slightly ragged where the tool caught, small flecks of white where the point skipped, pure black in the darkest areas with no line at all, a crisp engraved quality throughout
What goes wrong
A white ink drawing on a black background comes back. Ask for the lines to be cut out of a solid black surface, with tone built from how close the cuts are.
Leave out
black lines on white, painted highlights, soft edges, grey tone, colour, a smooth gradient
Watch for
It works backwards. Say the marks remove black rather than add white, because a model given scratchboard often returns white ink drawn onto black, which behaves differently at every edge.
Questions
Draw it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.