hello and welcome to chief joe's art stuff my name is julie and i'm here to impart some knowledge to
you today via a two-minute art tip and today's tip we're going to be talking about the term
scruffito and you will see it spelled out here yes it is spelled weird and no i don't know why
it originally is from an italian word which could explain it i don't know um but basically
the the word originates in reference to techniques where involving either
plaster work or sometimes ceramics where you're talking about two layers that are imposed upon
each other and then you're scratching through the top layer to reveal the bottom layer the
kind of scrapito that we're talking about here is not exactly the same thing what we're talking
about what i'm going to demo for you today is actually scratching into wet watercolor washes
and creating some like really kind of magnificent line work what i have here is a kilimanjaro 9x12
this is a 140 pound cold press watercolor pad in a block in bright white so we're going to use that
as the paper and what we're basically doing is we're going to abrade
the surface to create a pattern in a wet watercolor wash and i'm actually going to use
this brush here which is a princeton neptune number six um because it carries a lot of water
and will allow us to do this pretty quickly and what we're gonna do is wet the surface graciously
uh and kind of like indicate where we want the color to go and where we don't want it to go by
dampening the surface and what this is going to do is kind of activate the fibers when they get wet
and caused them to kind of um puff up just a little bit
not a bunch and to try and make this as easy for you to see as possible i am actually going to use
indigo one because it's one of my favorite colors and two because it's nice and dark and it's going
to sink into these scratch lines really easily and make this easy for you to see so we've got
some american journey watercolor this is indigo again and we're laying that onto the surface
into this wet puddle of water already and you can see there's some nice feathering that's going
on which basically means that the pigments are dispersing within the wet area all on their own
so there's movement taking place with the color that doesn't have anything to do with your brush
which makes you look fantastically talented and yet you did literally not much so one of the
fun super super fun parts about watercolor so we're going to really lay in a lot of color
to looking like as dark as i want it yet but we're gonna get there
here we go fire it in there like someone amazing used to say so we're going to
get a really really nice coverage of this indigo inside that already dampened area
now you're going to think i'm completely and totally nuts which you would say
that's not all that uncommon what do i have here what is this tool this is actually a walnut picker
this was my grandmother's but it is perfect for this use but you can use
the ends of brushes i've actually used like little brads like little
nails and stuff like this i've used all kinds of different stuff broken pencils
to do this and what we're going to do is we're going to take this sharp edge
and we're going to just make some lines which is actually a braiding the fibers of this paper
it's kind of like scarring the surface and what happens is that the pigment sinks down into those
little teeny scars and makes this really really fascinating line now do you have to do this
with a um you know super super sharp surface nope you don't it depends on what kind of line you're
trying to make i like this because it gives me a lot of control and as you know i'm a borderline
at best and so having a little bit of control over this makes it extremely appealing to me
and as you can see this looks like you spent a whole lot of time doing you know fascinating
line work with a delicate brush you did not now you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with this
you can do really nice foliage you can do all kinds of cool you know line work for executing
all kinds of different kinds of shapes i do this a lot as kind of like the first layer for some of
my paintings because sometimes what i'll do is i'll lay in like a gold wash and then do this
then put a little bit of more a little bit more gold in there and just some select spots where
this will show up more or less it kind of fades in and fades out and i really like the way that
it gives the background some texture and then you have you know your focal point is kind of floating
on the top of this but i i've just played around with this technique a lot and i really really
love it so um try some scruffido it's a very very interesting technique maybe not exactly the word
you would totally use in this instance but this is the best word i know to describe it it's basically
just a scratching technique when you're scratching through layers of applied substance paint pigment
clay whatever so um hope that this was useful for you and hope that you enjoy
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