By Phil Lederer

How does one become a premiere scratchboard artist? Well, like any great love, you just kinda fall into it.

Long before she picked up a scratchboard, Sheryl Unwin was studying illustration at the Art Institute of Boston, looking to pick up a career. "We were commercial artists,” she says. “We were a bit more conservative than the ‘crazy fine arts students,’ who just wanted to do art for art’s sake.” And as a naturally shy artist, the “dog eat dog” world of illustration did not appeal. So she fell into graphic design, “by chance,” after a summer job spiraled into full-fledged career.

“It paid the bills,” she says, with all the enthusiasm of one recalling their yearly doctor’s appointment. “But I wouldn’t say graphic design is for me.” Still, she did it for more than 30 years. Paying the bills.

Fittingly enough, scratchboarding had a similar start, driven by the demands of economics, finding its origins as a commercial product for publishing houses and newspapers, where scratchboard images replaced the expensive engravings made on metal, wood or linoleum. At the same time, the medium allowed for finer lines and more intricate details. By the mid-20th century, scratchboard was the preferred illustration technique for medical and scientific publications, as well as technical catalogs.

This was long before Unwin’s time, of course, but their paths would dovetail one lonely night on the internet like an early 2000s rom-com.

Unwin was up late, surfing the art forums in the wee hours, looking at work from fellow colored pencil artists, reading discussions on technique. She stumbled across a forum about scratchboard art—something she hadn’t seen since high school. “What could they possibly be doing with scratchboard?” she remembers thinking to herself.
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“I was blown away,” she says. “The level of detail was immense. It was crazy.” She spent the night poring over one image and then the next, lost in the linework, entranced by the engraving. One thought ran through her head: I have to do this. Not one for half-measures, Unwin’s first project was an ambitious one: an 11”x14” portrait of a snow leopard looking up at a butterfly.

“I got hooked,” she says. “Now I just can’t stop.”

One of the interesting things about scratchboard art is that the artist is essentially working backwards. As opposed to a pencil or a paintbrush that adds pigment to the canvas, the artist is peeling back the ink, scraping away the shadows to reveal the light lurking beneath the surface. In so many ways, it’s just like drawing with that colored pencil, except in the very important ways that it simply is not. Understanding this fundamental difference can take some students months to wrap their heads around.

And in an odd way, it’s almost like sculpting.

“You have to have a whole different mindset,” says Unwin. “And it grabbed me in a whole different way.”

The process begins with a simple Masonite board, layered in white porcelain clay and coated with black India ink. It’s the blank canvas, if the blank canvas were a Stygian abyss staring right back at you. Using white chalk transfer paper and photographic references, Unwin traces the basic lines of her composition onto the scratchboard. Typically an animal portrait, the goal at this point is just to get the overall shape and proportion of the image right. Once satisfied with the chalk lines, she’ll carve those lines into the board and she’s ready to start in earnest. “Then you start scratching away,” she says.

And this, it seems, is the magical part for Unwin—the detail work. Where so many get excited at the prospect and the idea of a thing, only to sputter out when it comes time for a little elbow grease, this is where Unwin thrives, scratching away at her home studio or at the kitchen table, her husband nearby, the cat wandering around somewhere, presumably hiding its latest murder. Unwin doesn’t notice. “I disappear in my work,” she says, “and everything else is not really around me.”

Attacking the scratchboard with meticulous energy, her eye darting from her reference to her work in almost nystagmic oscillation, Unwin will use everything from X-Acto blades and tattoo needles to wire brushes and fingernails to make just the right mark to capture every follicle of fur, every glint of the eye, every nuance of shadow. “Because you’re not traditionally engraving,” she says. “You’re not digging into the board. You’re revealing, in stages, the white clay, so you can control your grayscale value.” Working with this added third dimension, Unwin feels even more in control of the marks she makes, even more able to capture the depth of her subjects.

“And believe it or not,” she says, “it’s actually more forgiving than working on paper.” If she overscratches, which does happen, she can simply replace the ink with various greyscale washes—dilutions of the same ink used in the scratchboard’s creation. In the same manner, Unwin can use watercolors on a finished scratchboard to add yet another dimension.

A standard-sized black-and-white piece can take as long as 60 hours to complete. Add another 40 for color. “And that’s only because I’m such a perfectionist,” Unwin says. “I need to have that accuracy in my work.”

The daughter of an American serviceman, it might be tempting to imagine Unwin inherited her discipline and eye for detail from her father, but Unwin suspects it might have more to do with her Japanese mother—an artist with the needle, always crocheting and sewing and knitting. A guiding force in the young artist’s life, Unwin remembers her as particular and precise, yet gentle and encouraging.

“I admired her,” Unwin says. “And that part of her has always been with me.” And though her mother passed seven years ago, Unwin feels her presence in the process. “She’s still with me,” she says, and the emotion in her voice is unmistakable.

And so Unwin will scratch away for hours, challenging herself to excel, to always be better. With each picture and every portrait, she strives to capture the exactitude of the moment. And underlying this dogged pursuit, the sincere belief that somewhere in the details, in the subtleties and the minutiae, in the incidental turned indispensable, the essence of the thing waits to be revealed.

Friends, students and fellow artists tell her she’s there. That she got it. “How much more realistic can you get,” they say. Unwin doesn’t see it.

“In my eyes, I’m not there yet,” she says.

But she’s not alone.