Advanced Paint Scraping Techniques

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail, and on behalf of expert village, I'm going to show you today how to do advanced painting techniques. The next technique that we are going to cover is called scraping. This is just scraping on a bare, white, canvas. What we're going to do is first apply a layer of pigment to our canvas. And then we're going to use our palate knife for some scraping effects that I'm going to demonstrate next. Make sure that you have a lot of paint here on your round brush. You can use bigger brushes for this, but this is the one I'm going with. And apply a nice solid layer to your canvas. Now I actually want to get some shapes involved here, so let's say maybe we'll have some trees or something poking up here as well. Nice contrasting background. Now I'd actually like to keep the paint on here quite thick. So make sure it's not overly thin. At least not in terms of demonstrating this effect here that we're about to do. Okay, now put your brush down, get out your palate knife, make sure your palate knife is clean, get a paper towel to wipe off the edges, and basically what we're going to do here is do a scraping effect. You can do it a number of ways, I favor going from left to right. You're going to have a lot of excess paint, just make sure and clean that off with another paper towel or something else you have here. Now this does a number of things. First off, by moving from the left to the right, it creates a sense of motion. It's definitely as if these things are moving forward, hurtling this way and they're leaving a little bit of a motion trail behind them and that's one effect that you can get. You can also make things blend together; take the harshness of edges away. You can make things appear further away because they are less stark, there's less paint here. The layer is a lot less thick that it once was. So you can consider doing these portraying objects in the distance, whenever a contrast appears too much, or just for a motion effect as well. I've seen scraping used for all three. Definitely don't think that just because you've put paint on the canvas that you're job is necessarily done. Sometimes you're going to find you're going to scrape that paint right back off the canvas again."