Scratchboard As A Fine Art Medium.

In the last few years Patrick Hedges has reconnected with this medium.

- Patrick Hedges

Having been born and brought up in Africa, it was natural for me to be heavily influenced by wildlife. My family would be on safari most weekends, camping in the middle of nowhere, and this was back in the days when you didn’t need to go anywhere near a ‘game’ park to be surrounded by animals of all kinds. Nowadays of course, game parks are the place to be to get fabulous reference material for wildlife art. I was also influenced by art since my father, a mad keen animal lover, was also an artist and the first scratchboard I ever saw was a leopard of his done back in the late 1960s.

We had the most amazing pets which fed my love of animals; a zorilla, a duiker, lots of snakes, lizards and frogs, various raptors including owls, a shrew, a heron and a pancake tortoise which was as flat as... well... a pancake.