I just completed a coat of arms on scratchboard for The College of Mythic Cartography. Check it out!
August 24, 2005
Abberdab loves finding quirky stuff and sharing it with strangers.
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I just completed a coat of arms on scratchboard for The College of Mythic Cartography. Check it out!
Abberdab loves finding quirky stuff and sharing it with strangers.
Love it! Did you have some sort of stencil or overlay that you worked with? I bet it looks even better in person.
Thanks a lot! I wouldn’t necessarily say it looks better in person – there is a three dimensionality to the scratchboard that can cast shadows on the white lines. It does however look more fabulous at high resolution. The impact of the fine lines are lost on the web, but I like how it becomes photograph like as it is reduced. I recreated my original pencil sketch in Illustrator (hooray for Illustrators CS2’s 3-d function!) to get the angles right and set the type. I printed it out on my laserprinter, rubbed white chalk all over the back of the paper, and then traced the image onto the scratchboard. Everything beside the basic outline of each element was improvised, ie. the cross-hatching and the vinework. The version in Illustrator was sterile and I had to have a certain amount of faith in my abilities that executing the design in scratchboard would give it the texture and life that I wanted. I’m particularly fond of the subtle shadow under the door created by *not* working that area. Working from dark to light can really twist your head.