Sunday, June 20, 2010

Drawing with Crayons

Drawing with crayons makes for a challenging exercise if you're used to media like graphite, as I am. And by crayons, I'm not talking about Conte crayons or colored pencils. I mean your average Crayola or similar company crayons, the soft wax ones. Why crayons? They were available and I wanted to try something different.

In summary, this week I helped out at the zoo's summer camp. During some calm periods during the week, I did a little drawing of stuff around me. On this day, we were in the classroom where we have a variety of animal artifacts, including real and fake animal skulls and various kinds of shells. While I did have my usual collection of pencils, I was tired of them and had something of a block. To add something new, I used some of the crayons in the buckets on the table.
The items shown are part of a deer skull and a scorpion spider conch. It was rather fun to draw these with the crayons. The biggest challenge was their bluntness, and it was most apparent in the conch drawing and another shell not included here. Still, if you hold it right and apply the right pressure, you can achieve a pretty good variety of lines and strokes. If I had more patience, I could probably get a full value drawing of the shells. Drawing with crayons might make for a good exercise in the future, and a nice change from graphite.

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