Watercolor Scratching Technique

Video Transcript

"This technique here is called scratching. What you have to do is make sure that you have dry paint, because wet paint won't scratch properly. The way you tell if it's wet or dry, you put your hand on it. If it feels cool it is still wet. If it doesn't feel cool it is pretty much dry. So what you want to do is scratch the surface. Not deep. Generally, you want to take a hobby knife like this and scratch the surface to form white lines. Those white lines can be painted on. So if you need to have a lighter tone line then you can scratch it into your surface and then paint on top of it. If you work it just right it will skip, giving you dots. If you press a little harder it will give you less dots and more of a line."