Scratched Patterns: Creating mixed media art work.

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

During our last few art classes we have been working on an art project focused on creating a scratch-off drawing. It is a nice technique, very much liked by the children due to the fact that it is pretty easy to use (even though a little time-consuming, since preparing the sheet takes much of the classroom time). The media/tools used to make a picture are as follows: oil pastels, black paint or ink, a wooden stick or a plastic fork, a sheet of construction paper. We used a larger piece of paper, however the smaller sheets are quicker to fill with color. To cover the sheet with color we used oil pastels. They are a great medium that allows you to cover the entire piece of paper in considerably short period of time. What is more, they allow you to blend the colors, and thus create the hues by overlapping strokes of different colors or simply get new shades of the same color. It is important to cover the whole space of the sheet of paper, making sure that the patches join together, not leaving any white spaces between them. When the entire sheet is coated with colorful patches (like I said - mixing colors is much welcome), the next step is to put the final coat of black paint on top of the picture (cover the oil pastel patches completely with black paint or ink). Then you need to leave the paint until it is dry. Finally, you take a wood stick or you simply use your finger (the black paint scratches away easily) to reveal spectacular rainbow colors underneath. You may get amazing effects revealing intriguing and distinctive patterns. You can also scratch the design through the wet paint. 

The title of our scratched drawings was "Winter Fun".  

The pictures below show the steps the students had to take in order to get the final shape of their works of art. 

“All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.”  

 

 

“There is something beautiful about a blank canvas, the nothingness of the beginning that is so simple and breathtakingly pure. It’s the paint that changes its meaning and the hand that creates the story. Every piece begins the same, but in the end they are all uniquely different.”