Crayon Day

I read that today was to be "Crayon Day" and, although I have heard nothing more about it, I decided that it could be Crayon Day on this blog. They were created in 1903. The inventor was Edwin Binney who formed the firm Binney and Smith but it was his wife who invented the name "Crayola". Alice Stead Binney took the "cray" from the French "craie" for chalk and "ola" as short for olegineax for oily - and now we have had them for 116 years as one of the first art materials children get to use. As you can see from my old box, they can last forever! My white is missing - I think I used it up long ago as a wax resist when using paint. I rarely use them now but they live on on my desktop. I like the new water-soluble wax crayons and sometimes use them for Life Drawing as they can be used dry and then blended somewhat with water...retaining some of the linear wax crayon look too. So, cheers to Edwin (1866-1934) and Alice and wax crayons!

Introducing Art History

A delightful picture book came my way last week. I would highly recommend it  for a number of reasons. First, it is a good imaginative story in itself. It has quality, not cartoon-y, illustrations and it is educational. It is even has words not often found in picture books- cerulean and indigo, for example- to describe some blues the fox is seeing and this can really appeal to young children by giving them new words to play with.

If you look carefully, Monet can be found painting in his garden on quite a few pages. There is also a yellow butterfly that follows all the action. A natural follow-up would be to find reproductions of Monet's paintings as an introduction to this famous artist. The expressions on fox's face as very well done. There is also a very satisfying ending that shows the joys of plein-aire painting and solves fox's problem of how to preserve the colours of the garden. This is one to really enjoy reading aloud to a youngster and I predict it could be a real favourite for them to keep.

High Noon

Here is my pastel of Michael as Gary Cooper in High Noon . the drawing is done on a rough hand-made paper as I felt it suited the subject.  I love doing figure drawing and I feel that drawing is really important. I usually do Life Drawing once a week and save some drawings, The warm-up one and two-minute poses are drawn on newsprint and I usually just put them in the recycling bin. Right now  I am drawing with a white pencil on black paper - just exploring the effects of the light making highlights on the figure. There are more pages in the black sketchbook than I originally thought so it is going to be awhile before I get back to colour. Maybe I'll work with water-soluble crayons then - or even watercolour for awhile. This pastel work is from a different day - usually every other week - when we have a "long pose" and I often  work in mixed media - in my case - pastel over acrylic and acrylic pastel gel which you can see in previous posts.