Monday, July 07, 2008

'Mini HORROR SCRAPERBOARDS'






I am not sure when these mini horror scraperboards came out, but they are most likely from the 70's or early 80's at a guess. This originally was a 15 card pack of which only 6 were pictures, the other cards were blank scraperboards that you created your own pictures on. As you can see above is the cover and 4 of the pictures, not sure what the other 2 were. Here we have King Kong, Frankenstein's Monster, Werewolf, and Dracula. Anyone that is familiar with scraperboards will know that the idea was that you scraped off the lines of the picture to reveal the white underneath, as well as making the picture more clear and stand out more, it also was quite skillful in that you needed a good eye and steady hand to scratch off the details of the pictures. The cards above were already done by someone else, but as you can see you can get a good effect by just highlighting some of the picture. These cards measure 4 inches by 2 1/2 inches approx. I have seen a horror scraperboard not so long ago that features Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, Wolfman etc on a 8 by 10 inch picture and when the outline is scraped away it glows in the dark.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, the cards came out around 1978/79. I had a set. Looking at them now, the whole concept was a bit boring. In that time when compter games weren't affordable, there was a much bigger focus on arts and crafts. The shops were stuffed with artstraws, plenty of paint by numbers kits. The whole original horror genre mostly faded away when electronic games took their grip.

Paul said...

Hi
Can you remember what the other 2 cards were in the set?
I was never really into computer games at the time, although I do remember playing 'Pong'and I thought it was so amazing, this was state of the art, a game you could play on a TV set.
Yes Paint by numbers was especially very popular, as was jigsaw puzzles, colouring books and board games.

Brian Artillery said...

Nice unusual choice of vampire there: the dapper David Niven from the movie 'Vampira'.