Scratchboard: The Frisk

The Frisk. 1998. Scratchboard. 9"x11".

In high school we often had assignments of taking different mediums and creating a piece with them. Back then I was mainly interested in honing a realistic style, and so my projects would rarely be surreal or memory-based. For this piece, a National Geographic was used to show a police officer frisking a man against a university wall (it was a bank in the original picture). I used an X-acto knife to scrape off the thin layer of black plastic that covered the white scratchboard, and the texture that resulted somewhat resembled grass. The reference image's stark shadows helped the final scratchboard piece pop more, I think.