Scratch painting: fun for kids, therapy for grownups
If you never did scratch painting as a kid, you missed out on something fun. Lucky for you, it’s never too late to enjoy a bit of childhood.
What’s so neat about this particular art form is that it seems like magic. Basically, you cover a piece of paper with crayon in various random colors, then paint over it with tempera paint, then (after the paint has dried) you scrape away lines of paint with a toothpick or something similar. As you scratch away the paint, random colors come alive (that’s the crayon).
Cindy Lou at Skip to My Lou has a detailed explanation of how to do scratch painting.
Scratch painting is a great art project to turn kids loose on (as long as they’re old enough to know better than to eat the art supplies). It’s also fun for the grownups taking care of the kids, or grownups in general. It seems like there’s something about visual art that uses a different part of the brain than most of our other activities. It’s almost like taking a vacation from your brain.
The other thing that’s really cool about scratch painting is that no scratch painting is ugly, or even disappointing. They’re all pretty fascinating to look at. So even if you think you have the artistic skills of a Commodore 64 and you’re really uptight about it, you can have fun with this.
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