Sketchmeister Spencer Nugent once told us that students often ask him what type of pen or paper they should use. His answer: "There is no magic pen, there is no magic paper." In other words, it doesn't matter what you use to draw with. What matters is that you learn to draw.

There's no clearer proof of this than the work of Leonardo da Vinci. It's safe to say he didn't have fancy Faber-Castells or an elaborate pencil case, yet he was able to produce a range of line weights, gradations and tones that would be the envy of anyone with a Dick Blick preferred customer card. Here, British conservator Alan Donnithorne demonstrates the primitive, yet ingenious, tools that da Vinci used to produce drawings:

How about that erasable paper?

The video was produced by the UK's Royal Collection Trust in support of the traveling Leonardo da Vinci: Ten Drawings from the Royal Collection exhibit.

Throughout 2016, ten of the finest drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Royal Collection will travel to four museums and galleries across the United Kingdom and Ireland in a new exhibition.

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The works have been selected to show the extraordinary scope of the artist's interests, from painting and sculpture to engineering, zoology, botany, mapmaking and anatomy, as well as his use of different media – pen and ink, red and black chalks, watercolour and metalpoint.

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…There are almost 600 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in the Royal Collection. They were originally bound into a single album, which was probably acquired in the 17th century by Charles II. Beyond the 20 or so surviving paintings by Leonardo, the artist's drawings are the main source of our knowledge of this extraordinary Renaissance man and his many activities.

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Leonardo's drawings are the richest, most wide-ranging, most technically brilliant, and most endlessly fascinating of any artist.

The show is currently running at Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, but only until April 24th. Thereafter it will travel to Dublin, Nottingham and Swansea. You can keep track here.