Sgraffito in Advanced Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I am going to show you today how to do advanced painting techniques. The next technique I am going to tell you about has an Italian name, Sgraffito. If you can say that fast three times, you are quite talented. But I'm just going to show you how to do that technique today. It's very simple. We start by taking our average painting brush and turn it upside down. This technique is you basically take the other side of your brush, you can also take almost any other sharp instrument, but I usually prefer brush handles. What we are going to do is we're going to go back over this very thick paint layer and we're going to actually make outlines. See some of the lines that are showing up here? What we are doing is we're going back in and we're scraping away the paint. We're basically making lines. You can go nuts on this if you want. Maybe you want to actually have, make these guys look like trees. Draw in some quick branches here. You can sometimes even drag the paint down to the bare canvas where it wasn't before. This technique is really useful for kind of bringing in additional texturizing style to your paintings. They can be used to show everything from rain, to limbs, to also even like flame, if you put a little like curvature into your lines. Now, this technique does not work as well whenever you have very thin paint, because it's very, it's much easier whenever the paint layer is thick to kind of go in there and really gouge out a trail for yourself. Whenever it is really thin, you're not making a big difference and you can't really see it. So' it's basically kind of like snow shovel your lawn when there is only an inch on the ground."