Ink and scratchboard illustrations

Drawing with ink is a tricky business, for it is not as forgiving as many other media—make a mistake and you often have to start over. It can also be a very slow, tedious process if you do a lot of hatching and/or stippling as I usually do. Scratchboard is even more challenging, for it contans all of the perils of ink drawing plus the additional difficulty of having to work iin reverse—drawing in the highlights, not shadows. That is, unless you use white scratchboard (or clay board) which allows you to work both ways—you can draw and paint on it with black ink and then scratch it away like regular scratchboard. I should use it more often; but for some reason I usually just do straightforward ink drawings.