Experimenting with a Northern Flicker

I guess you could call this one a personal challenge on starting with a goofy board which once had a traced portrait start, then the inked and heavily scratched start of a red-tailed hawk, then totally scraped and re-inked with a brush and now has the flicker started on it. You can see what happened with the white chalk and the fingerprints (the ink wasn't wet but still seemed to grab the prints like a magnet) and also the heavy brush texture of the ink.

I like what the brush texture is doing in the background - it's a bit treeish. And the fingerprints, which would not come off btw, are now incorporated as diffused light. So it's coming along in an interesting way. If it finishes well I'll be happy, if it doesn't I'll still have learned a few more things. I'm having fun with it. This is a 6x8" board that started its journey as a white Claybord. The reference photo is from Rodney Campbell over on Paint My Photo.

The heavy ink is a bit of a challenge to scratch in some places and some of the vertical brush marks are visible through the bird, but it doesn't bother me artistically since it is a texture over the entire board.

I probably won't do color on this.

Tracing and Transfers

Not a good photo, but I wanted to show something about transferring images onto scratchboard. In this one I started tracing with a pen (the head on the left) then switched to a soft pencil once I saw what a hard line I was getting with the pen.
I've not been doing scratchboard for long, but I already know that the lighter the white transfer line the easier to get rid of it on the black board. The pen left a line that was much too strong. Easy to see and follow, but hard to cover especially in lightly scratched or black areas. So far even some of my finished sprayed works the transfer lines still show.
I also switched from Saral transfer paper to Super Chaco paper. It seems good and comes off a bit easier.
When I was using the white Claybord a few years back I drew the sketches in ink, but now I just enlarge my images on the computer, print them to size, and trace. It's so much easier and, for me, faster - plus, less mess on the black scratchboard to have to cover or work around.