My husband said to call this one “Up to No Good.”
Claybord is an excellent surface for many mediums including graphite and colored pencil, which is how I discovered it while searching for a surface other than paper to experiment with. The surface is smooth and feels like porcelain, but it’s actually a layer of clay over a hardboard. If you finish your work with varnish, it doesn’t have to be displayed under glass. Claybord is also a great scratchboard surface.
The longer I play with art, the more my mediums combine. With the bunnies, I used Golden High Flow Acrylics as a background with Derwent Drawing Pencils for the foreground. I scratched in some highlights and then put in another layer of pencil. I felt like I could keep swapping back and forth as long as I wanted to. I probably stopped after three layers.
I’ve discovered one of my all-time favorite surfaces, mineral paper, is a great scratchboard surface, too. What luck that I happen to have a huge supply of the thick, 16 pt Terraskin paper. Here, I practiced on it using my new favorite colored pencils, Derwent Drawing Pencils.
I used graphite and the Derwent pencils to draw this barn picture:
In one of my mixed media moods, I started this sparrow drawing with acrylic, put in the autumn leaves with Inktense (and salt for the mottled effect), and then finally finished it a month or two later with the Derwent Drawing Pencils:
And I sketched a ton of horses last week. And one dog:
I’m continuing my endeavor of sketching all 47 birds in the book Identify and Draw North American Birds. I’m swapping between Caran D’ache Luminance and Derwent Drawing Pencils. The Derwent pencils don’t have many bright colors, but the birds often call for vivid reds, blues, and greens, so I often reach for the luminous Luminance.
