"Sleeping Patterns" - New Scratchboard Drawing

"Sleeping Patterns", diptych - each half is 8" x 8", on Ampersand Scratchbord

I finished this drawing with about two days to spare. I wanted to submit something new for this year's International Society of Scratchboard Artists' (ISSA) exhibit. I had to take a week-long break from the "Down on the Farm" series to make the April 1st entry deadline. This tiger drawing has been on my "to do" list since I saw the wonderful reference photo in a Sacramento Zoo membership brochure. I'm fortunate to have contacts at the Zoo, so I was able to get permission to use the photo and a high resolution digital file from which to work. I knew from the moment I saw the photo that I needed to come up with a unique concept for rendering it. Using scratchboard was a no-brainer and the composition pretty much created itself. I wanted to makethis a diptych (two part) piece, so I took the original photo and cropped/scaled it into two 8" x 8" sections. I liked the mirror image of the photo better, so I flipped it also. I used Derwent Inktense pencils to color only the tigers' heads and I knocked the rest of the drawing back with a wash of diluted black ink. You can see each finished half at the bottom of this post.

The original photo

The photo flipped, sized and cropped into two parts

Greyscale version of the previous photos

Since I was up against a deadline, I didn't have time to scan this drawing in progress, but I did scan each part after I finished the scratching.



And here are the two finished halves.


This piece represents a lot of scratching and I'm very pleased with the way it turned out. And it's always nice when a finished drawing matches the vision I had for it!