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!

Caran d'Ache

     Here are a few recent life drawings- this first is two five-minute poses from our rotation pose, the next two are 20-minute poses and the last is 35 minutes. All are drawn with Caran d'Ache watersoluble wax crayons. The last book I filled at Life Drawing was black and white on grey paper so I figured it was time for a switch into colour. Draw dry, take a brush to wet the drawing and it all blends in but can still retain a bit of the linear look of drawing.
     As you know from previous blogs,  I've been looking into the history of pencils and drawing materials so I researched the Caran d'Ache line. This line has over 100 years of history as  the factory was set up in Geneva in 1915 using graphite found in the Swiss mountains. Around the same time, there was an illustrator in Paris who became very famous. He took the pen name (or should we say "pencil name"?) of Caran d'Ache from the Russian word for pencil. And, just to make this even more of an international mix-up, the Russia word comes from a Turkish root "kanco tash" which refers to black stone. Nine years after starting, the Swiss company took the name of the illustrator and used a stylized version of his signature as their logo. I'm assuming the illustrator was paid for this.
     Caran d'Ache makes a full line of pencils, pens and drawing materials. Their pens are renowned for  being especially beautiful. For the 100year anniversary, Caran d'Ache created a clever design of a ballpoint pen that looks like a pencil. Unfortunately, I don't have one but I do enjoy the Caran d'Ache
materials that I do have.