Art Activities: Scratch Art

Over Christmas and for Aristotle’s birthday, he received a number of art activity packs. We love getting art activities as presents because they are a great way to entertain the kids. This scratch art kit was the first of the activity packs we dove into:

Locally, they are available for sale at some of those little kiosk stalls in the malls around town. They cost a few dollars for one scratch board, a stencil and a simple wooden scratch stick. Alternatively, you can purchase them on Amazon where there is a variety of Scratch art kits and books available.

This is the sample of what you can create with the scratch art kit:

Aristotle working on his masterpiece:

The unveiling:

Scratch art seems to have really taken off since I remember doing it in art class at school. Back then, we made our own scratch art with plain white paper, coloured crayons and black tempera paint (although apparently acrylic paint works too but it stains so not so great when working with younger children).  After drawing a picture with crayons, we painted over the entire sheet with the black paint. Once it dried, we scratched off the black paint – only the parts covering the crayon would come off.

If you would like to make your own scratch art from scratch, check out the instructions over at Little Art Monkeys. Here, they have made their own scratch board by colouring the entire sheet of paper with crayon. You can also choose to draw a picture with crayons and leave parts of the sheet white. The parts of the sheet that aren’t coloured over with crayons will not scratch off and remain black.

What you will need:

• Black tempera paint
• Plain white paper
• Coloured crayons (the more brilliant the crayons, the more impressive the effect will be – for instance you could try using glitter crayons or fluorescent crayons)