What is scraperboard, and can you try it on screen?

Scraperboard is a board coated with a layer of smooth white clay and then covered with black ink. You make a picture by scratching the black away with a fine blade, so every mark you make is a white line on a dark ground. In America it is usually called scratchboard. Easel by Zaweba, a free painting studio for Windows, includes scraperboard among its 37 surfaces, and blades scratch it back to white just as they do on the real board.

It is an unusual way to draw, because you work from dark to light. Instead of adding lines, you take them away. The look it gives is crisp and detailed, something like a wood engraving or an old newspaper illustration, and it suits animals, fur, feathers, botanical studies and portraits with strong lighting.

How the real thing is made and used

The board itself is usually hardboard with the clay layer on top. Ready-blacked boards are the most common, but white boards also exist for artists who want to ink their own areas. The tools are simple: a pointed scratching nib for fine lines, a curved blade for wider strokes, and sometimes a fibreglass brush or a scalpel for textures.

Artists build tone with lines. Close, fine scratches make a light area. Sparse ones leave it dark. Cross hatching gives mid tones. Because each line shows pure white, the drawing is all about direction and spacing, which is why scraperboard fur and feathers can look so lifelike.

Colour can be added afterwards by washing ink or watercolour over the white lines, which takes the colour while the black stays black.

Trying scraperboard in Easel

In Easel every picture starts on a real surface with its own tooth, absorbency, colour and texture, and tools react to the surface. On scraperboard, blades scratch through to the white. That means you can practise the whole approach on screen, without buying boards or blades, and with 80 steps of undo by default. On the real thing a mistaken scratch is very hard to hide.

Begin by choosing scraperboard as your surface. Plan the picture loosely in your head, or put a reference photo beside the canvas. In Easel a reference can sit beside the painting or show as a faint tracing guide, and it is never merged into your picture, which suits scraperboard well, because careful placement matters.

Scratch the brightest highlights first, then build up mid tones with closer or crossing lines. Leave the darkest areas almost untouched.

Tips for a good result

Follow the form. Let your lines run the way fur grows or the way a surface curves, and the subject will read as solid.

Work from large to small. Rough in the big light areas with broader strokes, then go back with finer ones for detail.

Use the view checks. The squint view, which softens the picture the way half-closed eyes do, shows whether the overall pattern of light and dark is working. The mirror view flips the picture so you can check proportions with fresh eyes. Both are only on screen and never affect the painting.

Stop before it's too light. Scraperboard looks best with plenty of black left in it.

Related surfaces and tools

If you enjoy taking paint away rather than adding it, try sgraffito too. Easel has a sgraffito stylus for scratching through wet paint to reveal the layer below, which gives a softer, more painterly version of the same idea. The scraper and palette knife also push wet paint aside to show what's underneath.

You can also export your finished piece as PNG, JPEG or TIFF, and send a PNG to Paint by Zaweba if you want to work on it further with layers and masks. Scraperboard in Easel by Zaweba is a low-risk way to find out whether the craft is for you.