How to Create Handmade Scratch cards?
Scratch cards are fun, and not just the online ones. It’s hard to explain this, but there’s something about the feeling you get when you scratch the coating off the cardboard and find out what’s underneath. Scratch cards are not only fun to play, but also great as an activity in a dinner or birthday parties. To save some expenses, it’s recommended to go on the ‘Do it yourself’ approach. Since we’re always eager to bring you fun and useful tips here at Winnings.com’s blog, we’ve decided to provide you with a full and extensive guide for creating your own scratch card.
It is actually so easy to create your own scratch card that you’ll probably be running off to create one yourself the moment you finish reading this post. Let’s start with the ingredients for your very own handmade scratch card:
- Silver Acrylic color
- Medium-small size brush with soft edges
- Soap – the best one is a simple dish soap (we’ll explain later what exactly you do with this one)
- A thin Cardboard papers
- Color pencils and someone with a drawing talent / Colors and a stencil / Internet and a printer
- Stanley knife
- Ruler
Now, the first thing you need to do is decide on a theme. You can get ideas from the many scratch cards themes we have here at Winnings.com which you can access through our games lobby. We recommend you try adjusting the theme to your guests’ age, gender and common characteristics. Otherwise you can just go on general themes like abstract shapes, nature, animals etc.
Next is a bit tricky and probably takes the most time – getting the graphics on the card. This can be done in different ways, depending on your time and artistic abilities. The simplest thing to do is finding copyright free images like you can find in this site: Shutterstock.com, editing them a bit using free image editing program. We recommend Paint.net, which is free and easy to use.
The next thing to do is decide on a matrix and system:
- Matrix – You can choose 9 boxes or 6, depending on the odds you want to give your players. Designing that is fairly easy using any image editing program or even word.
- System – you need to decide from advance what the winning strike is. Will it be 3 of the same kind, a row of the same kind, a sum of numbers to reach etc. Once you’ve picked that, you place the icons in the boxes accordingly.
So now you have the theme and scratch area fields design done. You either print it or draw everything by hand. If you print it you can place several cards on the same sheet of paper and after the coating is dry, cut it using the Stanley knife.
Placing the coating of the scratch card
Now comes the fun part – placing the coating on and this is where the silver acrylic color and soap come to place. The best formula is 1part soap and 2 parts silver color. You mix the two together in a bowl, take the brush and start covering the boxes in the scratch card’s matrix. You can either cover them with a casual brush strike or use a thin brush and a ruler to draw a neat square cover. Let it dry for about an hour and if needed apply another layer.
Once the boxes are fully covers, let it dry in the sun for a couple of hours. When you’re certain it’s completely dry, start cutting the scratch cards using a Stanley knife and a ruler.
And that’s it – you have your own handmade scratch card!
For inspiration or just for fun, don’t hesitate to visit our games lobby and try one of our many fun scratch card games we have available there.
