Drawing on a new surface can sometimes take a bit of time to get used to and discover what techniques work well. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing recently and I’m now in love with this surface!

I thought I’d share my latest tutorial, which features a kangaroo. I’ve used a surface that I haven’t worked with much before – Rising Museum Board. After testing it with my recent cowgirl project, I decided to create a tutorial for my Ignite members. This surface is lovely, designed primarily for mounting and matting portraits, as its name suggests, and it has a matte, soft texture. I will say it does mark easily, so that’s something to keep in mind if you plan to use it. 

The board behaves similarly to hot press paper, requiring sharp pencils and relatively hard pressure, though I found I needed less pressure compared to using a surface like Fabriano Artistico. The other thing that I like about it is the colour lays down really quite vibrant from the start.

The focal point for my drawings is usually the eyes, but in this piece that wasn’t the case because it’s a whole-body portrait and therefore the focal point kind of becomes the kangaroo itself and the texture of its fur.

I used a combination of Polychromos, Luminance, and Lightfast pencils for this piece, which worked well together. When drawing fur, I start with gentle, light layers to plot the colour and direction of the fur and then really ramp up the pressure, but not so much that you’re going to start hurting your joints! I had to experiment a little bit to see what was going to work well with the fur because this was my first time drawing fur on Rising Museum Board. I used a combination of pinks and browns, Burnt Sienna, those sorts of pinky orangey colours. I used some Venetian Red, I found the Lightfast Mars Black to be very useful but I did need to brighten the piece up a bit later on with the Burnt Sienna and Terracotta from the Polychromos range. I actually found the Luminance Brown Ochre was one of the best colours for this piece and I loved the Luminance on this smoother surface.

Even though I’d consider this a smooth surface, it was surprising how many layers it took and it worked very well with Scotch tape as well which worked really well and I didn’t end up really using an eraser. The Scotch Tape literally takes it back down to the paper and it’s honestly a great technique for adding texture when you have thick fur. It’s important to test whether the tape works well with the surface you’re working on as it can sometimes lift off the material. If you’d like a tutorial on how I use the Scotch Tape, you can watch it here.

I worked in sections, starting with the upper body and moving down to the tail, establishing fur texture in early layers to help when it comes to building up the shadows and shapes.

I talk about colour a lot in my teaching and I talk about the fact that colour doesn’t make realism and I stick by that because colour doesn’t make realism you know what makes realism is getting your tonal values and your structure correct. However, colour of course does have its part to play and it’s really nice to use your colour theory and bring in complementary colours that are going to work well with the colours you’re using. If you’d like to gain a better understanding of colour theory you can download my Free Colour Theory Guide here.

This Kangaroo took about 8 hours to complete and I’m really loving working on this new surface! If you’d like to learn more about this surface and gain access to this full tutorial, it’s now available in my Ignite Membership. You can join my waitlist to become an Ignite Member here.