I first put straight water through the brush to get an idea of how it feels. I found just a few minutes to experiment with the airbrush tonight. Now I’m trying to decide if I’m going to add some color. I’m feeling pretty good about the result. The stars came last to give a background that wouldn’t compete with the owls. So, I pushed them back a little further with a diluted ink wash using Ampersand “black repair” that comes with their set of scratchbord inks: I inked over them with a Faber Castell PITT artist pen brush, waited for them to dry, and re-scratched them. Initially the leaves were way too bright and competed with the owls for attention. Once I settled on the design, I transferred it to a 5×7 board with Chaco paper and red ballpoint pen:įor scratching I used a sharpened steel point that a friend made for me. I wasn’t trying to achieve realism, but I wanted to include at least a hint of it. My latest scratchboard is more illustrative than realistic.įor it I borrowed the basic design of an owl that my sister burned into a wooden spoon. So, with even more excellent tools, I guess it’s time to dust off some of my works in progress and put these tools to use. They fit just right into the 1/8″ holes in my dowels. They look a lot like some of the fancy blades I’ve seen other scratchers use. They were carbide steel engraving bits for CNC machines. I thought they might be milling bits, but my searches turned up some bits that didn’t look like what I had. Of course, I wondered if might want to try grinding some of my own, and I couldn’t remember what they were and what material they were made of (later found out they were cobalt deburring blades). I included a photo in a post back in August.

I could drill a 1/8″ hole in a section of dowel and insert one of the bits. When I finally looked at the bits again, I realized I didn’t need a pin vise. The little steel blades were the last thing on my mind at the time, and lay forgotten in a storage box until last summer.

Not long after that came the flurry of activity in my life that involved getting married and moving across the country. To try them out he let me borrow me a pin vise for a few days and I thought they were great. Several years ago a friend of mine did me a favor and made me some scratch blades out of discarded cobalt deburring blades. Durability is probably the first reason a scratchboard artist would seek for a new tool that does essentially the same thing as an Xacto blade. But, tiny steel points don’t hold up forever, and eventually I have to reach for a new blade. For example, I have done the majority of my work with #16 and #11 Xacto blades, and they have served me very well. I think it’s the nature of scratchboard artists to constantly look for new tools, even if their current set of tools works perfectly well.

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