DIY Scratch Art

This colourful scratch art paper is easy to make at home. Kids will love this fun art technique!

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My son has just finished seven weeks of summer camp, and a few times a week he’s been having art and craft sessions. The other day he came home with a scratch art star that they’d been working on – he was really proud of it. The next day I realised that all had gone quiet for a while, and  I discovered him making his own scratch art. He’d done a layer of coloured crayons, covered it in black crayon, and even put a wooden chopstick in a pencil sharpener (who knew you could do that?!?) to start scratching off the black layer!

It was very cute but not very effective, so I decided that we should try this properly. To make this art project we used:

• White card cut in half
• Oil pastels or crayons
• Black acrylic paint and foam brush
• Toothpick, wooden skewer or similar

I’d had a box of oil pastels sitting in a drawer for a while, and thought we could use those. They blend better than crayons and seem to be easier for covering the whole piece of card. F was happy to do only one design, using just red, orange, and greens.

He asked me to do the rest and I was happy to oblige! I made a multi-colour one, a rainbow one, a blue/green one, a red/pink one (for hearts!) and a mostly-white one with patches of yellow (for a star picture!).

Then we covered each card in black paint (I tried tempera paint but wasn’t happy with the coverage, so we switched to Apple Barrel Jet Black instead.

I gave all the cards a second layer of paint as some of the color wasn’t –  um- completely covered by my son. 🙂 The next day we used toothpicks to scratch designs into the paint layer.

F made random scratches in the card that he had coloured, then used mine to make a fireworks picture and then the yellow one to make stars. 

The stars weren’t actually successful – the black paint couldn’t be scratched off the areas that weren’t covered in the oil pastels, so make sure you fill the WHOLE card with colour. Meanwhile, I tried out a more intricate design!

Here our our six finished designs. Fireworks, rainbow, hearts, random, spirals and stars.

Don’t want to make your own? Buy a scratch art kit instead!