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: