Sgraffito – starting from scratch

Here’s a drawing technique I’ve recently used on a table top which I simply love and have done ever since I started delving into decorative techniques!

A little known fact is that my “Annie Sloan” signature logo was also created using this 
technique.

So have you guessed what the technique is? Yes, it’s sgraffito and it actually dates back to the Middle Ages, and quite simply translates from Italian as ‘scratched’ or ‘scratch work’. It can be applied in painting, pottery, and glass.

The yummyness of it

Essentially, if you are a painter, then at some point or other you are going to put paint on and then turn your brush round and scratch out some of the paint with the handle tip or similar. So effectively you are drawing into the paint by taking it off. I’ve always liked the texture and the yummyness of it.

With sgraffito, you generally apply layers of contrasting colour to a surface, and then scratch through a pattern or shape through the upper layer to reveal the colour below.

For Medieval palaces and churches, where money was no object, gold leaf often provided the base colour. Other colours were applied over the burnished gold and then the decorative design was scratched into the paint layer with a wooden stylus. It was fairly crucial that the paint had not dried completely so that it could be neatly removed without damaging the delicate gold layer underneath. Although we’re not likely to be doing a gold brocade decoration, the same ‘not-quite-dried’ technique applies today.

My jumping off point for my table top project was this 1940’s woodcut (I upcycled this years ago from an IKEA box). I’d Instagrammed a picture of this piece some time back and got lots of comments. I love that black and white look, and that's what I was going for initially. But I soon found that trying to transpose woodcut into sgraffito doesn’t really work!

A simple sgraffito character step-by-step

But I was on a mission and I had another inspiration – a quirky stick figure I drew on a cabinet in my house in Normandy.

The technique used to create this incised character is a variation of sgraffito and is also how I essentially created the sgraffito tabletop.

So I’ll take you through a few simple steps to show you the basics of this technique (for more detail, go to my Colour Recipes for Painted Furniture book (Cico, 2013):

1 Paint the entire piece with Chalk Paint® in one colour (here I used Graphite). Then paint the panels in a second contrasting colour (here Old White).

2 Now paint a smaller area in your first colour over the panel. Use thin strokes.

3 Almost immediately – while it is still wet – start to draw your design into the paint with the tip of the brush. Press and draw firmly, working into the wet paint to reveal the colour below.

4 When it’s all dry, add a coat of wax with a wax brush and lightly dab with a cloth to give a matte finish. Et voilá.

Grayson's inspiration

 

While I was revisiting this technique for my table top, I was reminded that it’s a technique also used by Grayson Perry. He does it on his pots, scratching into the clay. I love his work and it gave me the inspiration to experiment with figurative drawing rather than the usual patterns and scribbles, doodles and motifs I so often do. 

Perry works straight from the heart, which is the ideal springboard to create and try something new. He is a fantastic observer of contemporary life – be it political, satirical or more personal. He presents his view of the world much like William Hogarth did in the 18^th century. To me, he is very English, very special and quite different.

I’ve certainly been inspired by him and I would like to develop even more Perry-inspired,
sgraffito-style pieces.

PS I ought to add that to achieve the colour effects on the tabletop (you can see above and at the top of this post), I smudged different colours on to it with my thumb – again applying the paint slightly wet so I could change it, if I felt it wasn't quite right!)

What do you think?

Yours, Annie

[All project photography by Christopher Drake]

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Bookmarks (1)

For those of you who’ve just discovered my paint, Chalk Paint®, and think I might be new on the decorative painting scene (well, there might be some!), let me rekindle the book that really launched me all the way back in 1988.

  

It’s not the finish, it’s the start that counts

But first a bit of background. . . After studying for a degree and a Masters at art college, I moved to a small village in Oxfordshire with a young family, getting commissions from clients to paint murals and other finishes, and running courses and workshops. I learnt on the job, got my hands dirty and experimented with all sorts of weird and wonderful decorative techniques then in vogue – blocking, sponging, ragging, stippling, colourwashing, dragging, combing, flogging, spattering, marbling, tortoiseshellling, woodgraining, gilding, stencilling, and sgrafitto, to name a few. . . 

I relied on my art training, my passion for colour, my unceasing enthusiasm to experiment with different pigments and finishes, and a lot of trial and error. Having extensively researched the history and application of decorative painting, I realised that for such a wide subject there were very few accessible books around. That changed, as did my fledgling career, when I sat down to write The Complete Book of Decorative Paint Techniques.

This is me being presented to my new readership for the first time inside The Complete Book of Decorative Paint Techniques. I was still learning my trade. 

No flash in the pan

This exhaustive (and exhausting) title was my first published book, back in 1988. I’m pleased to say the result were well worth it: The Complete Book of Decorative Paint Techniques sold in the hundreds and thousands, was translated into 13 languages, and it really launched 'Annie Sloan'. 

Looking back on it now, I am still amazed at how comprehensive it was. I especially like the colour inspirations with the strong blues (see page extract below), reds, and greens etc.. These show how my background in colour – and hence part of this blog’s title – goes back such a long way. I also loved putting the objects and materials together to be shot – creating these montages for inspiration – long before the days of Photoshop!

My co-author, Kate Gwynn, had a design and print background and went to the London College of Printing. She understood how you put a book together – not just the visuals but the presentation of written material and information with images. At the time, it was very new to me. This is Kate (below) in the book.

Kate and I lived in the same Oxfordshire village and her husband Stanley Smith was a painter at the Royal College of Art. He knew that Mobius – a newly set up book packager (production company) at the RCA – were looking to produce a new title. So that’s how the whole thing started (you can see Mobius’s input on the imprint page below).

Many of the interiors shown in the book were mine, such as this kitchen scene (below). We begged and borrowed all the other house settings. 

In pages like these and below I can see both my apprenticeship on show, but also something of the direction I was to take – and a bit of my personality starting to come through.

Blockbusters

We did the book using oil paint, because that’s traditionally the paint everybody used. Back then I thought it was the only way I could get that translucency. It may look a bit dated now – and fashions change – but I’m still tremendously proud of it. 
The ‘Blocking’ section (below), for example, is really ‘me’ and very jolly and done with artists' water based paint acrylic paints. 

As is this tree print project (below) for the kids’ playroom, and yes I did use real pears and swedes.

Colour all the way
One innovative feature we added to this book was the use of colourways at the edge of every right hand page in the ‘Basic Finishes’ section. Here’s an example using Dragging. . . 

This helped us get over people’s common objections to a particular technique based on colour i.e. “I don’t like that because it’s in yellow”. By showing a finish in other colours we could overcome those barriers. 

My back pages
Researching and writing The Complete Book of Decorative Paint Techniques and its success meant a sequel was needed (which I’ll post about soon). It also spurred me on to develop my own paints as I became more and more absorbed by what paint is and how it works. 

So looking back over a quarter of a century of apprenticeship, application and experimentation (when many of my stockists hadn’t even been born!) you can see that Annie Sloan and Chalk Paint® come with a history, a heritage.

Chalk Paint® can applied to so many techniques – its versatility is the name of the game – and it’s as versatile as my approach to painting. With Chalk Paint® you'll find my whole history of mixing and colour mixing . . . in a pot. 

Yours, Annie