How to make crayon scratch art

Crayon scratch art! I used to love doing this myself as a kid -- scratching through the black layer of wax to reveal neon-like colors. Mehhhhhh-mreeeeees....

Skip To My Lou's scratch art how-to suggests using tempera paint as the top layer (although black crayon will work fine, too). [Via Kiddley]

Tags: Art projects, Parenting

Comments

[jim]

I second using black crayons.

If you must use tempera paint, make sure the adult uses it or you wash it off the child's skin as soon as possible.

I speak from experience. For an drawing project in college, I took inspiration from my instructors re-imagined photographs of aborigines in which he dressed colleagues in found items and painted their skin to resemble old Australian photos he had collected.

I used black tempera paint to paint the skin of my face, neck, and shoulders in funky tribal patterns and had Adrienne photograph me over the course of 30 minutes or so. I then used those photos as references for a massive self portrait (3 x 5 feet of my "aboriginal" head). Anyway, when I went to wash off the tempera, I had raised welts in the pattern of the paint all over my face, chest and shoulders.

It turns out that I got a chemical burn from the paint. It lasted for a couple of days. I talked to my professor about this and he said that he had mixed his pigments for clean dirt and other agents so that he could explicitly avoid this problem....

Would've been nice to know beforehand!

[Duane]

When I was in elementary school I remember hatching a plan to create lottery tickets in exactly this way. I'd write down prizes, then cover them up with black paint/crayon to be scratched off. Then I'd sell the tickets to my playmates at recess.

Can't remember if I ever went through with it. I don't think so. I definitely remember making them, because I made them out of old computer punchcards some teacher had given me to play with.

[Sarah]

We tried this yesterday with the paint and my 3 year old and her friend had trouble scratching hard enough to get the paint off so we're going to try again today with black crayon. We had fun just making the paper to do it though!