A scratch art drawing is is created by using a special black ink coated paper, called scratchboard, that you scratch along the surface to reveal the white paper underneath. Scratchboard technique is different than drawing in many ways, one of which is that instead of using a drawing tool to create dark marks onto a white paper, you are doing the opposite in that you remove the dark to reveal white so the process is quite opposite of traditional graphite drawing.

Scratchboard art can have a very dramatic effect. Because of the contrast of white to black, the artwork can show a lot of textured details on the paper. There are various tools that you can purchase for making a scratchboard, however, like you see in my demonstration below, the same basic technique can be applied by using an X-acto blade. With some practice, you can also learn to make some amazing scratch art.