Scratchboard with Watercolor

My second year drawing students just finished up a unit on shading that involved pointillism, crosshatching and hatchure strokes, and culminated with these phenomenal scratchboard/watercolor pieces. Scratchboard is a heavier stock paper that is overlaid with a black substance. You use a metal nib to scrape away the black to get to the white paper. Once there you can either just leave it white or watercolor overtop it. This top one belongs to the very popular with the girls, senior, Sam Chon :)

And then we had two kitty cats done by very talented seniors Brandon Liao (who is headed to Art Center in Pasadena to study Entertainment Design), and Marisela Herrerte, whose mommy just donated a tub full of art and crafts supplies. Thank you Mrs. Herrerte!!! Love how both Marisela and Brandon matted up their cats.

And lastly we have seniors Ashlee Chang and MaryLou Bunn, both extremely critical thinkers who always come up with something special to incorporate into their pieces. Ashlee didn't like the way the upper left portion of her pup turned out so she cut off the offensive area and woven up some newspaper strips and inlaid them into 3 spots around her piece. And Mary Lou, who loves to watercolor, scraped off a major portion of her scratchboard so she could do a lot with the watercolor. She also incorporated text around the edge of the mat. Very cool work all of you. I believe Mr. Z is gonna buy MaryLou's piece. Nice!!!!!!!!!