Drawing : Wax crayons and oil pastels

Most of us will have used wax crayons when we were at school or at home as a child. As we get older we tend to dismiss them as children's things, but they have a powerful grip on our collective imaginations because of that association with childhood, therefore I would like to devote this post to those Crayola crayons that I remember using alongside my children as they were growing up.

Crayola wax crayons are made primarily from paraffin wax and pigments. The process is the same for all Crayola crayon colours, the paraffin wax is melted and mixed together with pre-measured amounts of colour pigment. Paraffin wax has a very recognisable sheen that develops as you layer up your colours. Perhaps this is why children like these crayons so much, the surface can sometimes feel almost edible if you burnish or polish the layers.

Al Taylor Bondage Duck Study, 1998.

Al Taylor is someone to research if you want to think about how drawing materials are integral to visual invention. He drew with dissolved toner, wax crayons, ink and whatever else he could find to use as drawing materials. A sculptor, he saw his drawing materials as an extension of his sculptural materials, the implications of form being as much a suggestion of material possibility as his own ability to move materials around to find new relationships. The drawing above uses pencil, ink, acrylic mica mortar, graphite, colored pencil, China marker grease pencil and wax crayon on paper.

In contrast Calvin Marcus is much more controlled in his use of materials. He has deliberately linked two different types of oil and wax crayons in his development of these nine foot high paint stick drawn panels.

Calvin Marcus

Calvin Marcus had a problem we all have at one time or another. His small drawings done using wax crayons were fresh and exciting, but when scaled up they lost a lot of the original intensity. Therefore he decided to up-scale his drawing tools and used custom made oil sticks as a scaled up substitute for his wax crayons. “I have always had this problem with trying to make quick off-the-cuff drawings or energetic sketches into more substantial works,” Marcus said. “Things get fussy and stiff.” Created in partnership with paint maker Robert Doak, Marcus also developed several Crayola inspired colours for the paint sticks.
Marcus uses the oil sticks on canvas to copy the marks made by his Crayola crayons on paper. The surface of his canvas images having that familiar waxiness that we associate with children's colouring books. His images of military men, are made more awkward by their emergence from those crayon like waxy surfaces; over sized and blown up, they echo the shallow bombast of official military images.

There was a story told by Elaine De Kooning that Franz Kline had a similar problem. She told of a time when at some point in 1948, Kline had been visited by her husband Willem, who suggested that Kline project a sketch onto the wall of his studio using an opaque projector. (These were used at the time to take flat copy, like printed matter, and project it onto a screen, basically, a camera in reverse, with the light on the inside)

How to make your own opaque projector

As you can see from the 'how to' drawing above, opaque projectors tended not to have a very large copy screen, as they were made mainly to project photographs or text from books, therefore when Kline puts one on a drawing it only covers a small section of the original or he has to use a very small sketch. Kline described the projection as such:

"A four by five inch black drawing of a rocking chair...loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence."

He realised the implications of this and upscaled his brushes from artist's size to the biggest commercial decorator's he could find and began to use paint straight out of the tin. You can see how quickly he changed his way of working by comparing his work from 1948 to paintings done afterwards.

Franz Kline 1948

Franz Klien early 1950s

I digress from reflecting on wax crayons, but this problem of sometimes wanting to keep the freshness and dynamism of a small image or section of an image, when moving on to work on a much larger scale, is a continuing one. The issue came up yet again this week when talking to students about their work.

You can make your own wax crayons and there are a wide range of recipes available on the internet. Perhaps what might be more interesting would be to think more conceptually about this and perhaps research around the issue. The final crayons might include ingredients that have particular resonances, such as a ground down brick to make a colour that comes from a particular historical site. You can also make them at a self chosen larger size, as well as making unusual material combinations or variations. You might think that this occasional reflection on the making of art materials doesn't have much to do with the idea of careers in art but Robert Doak for instance has managed to build a career making paints and still does even though he is now in his 80s. Both Cecily Brown and John Currin buy their paints from Doak and you will find that there is a very close relationship between artists and the makers of the best artist's materials.

There are some subtle variations in the nomenclature of these artist's materials. For instance, a crayon made of pigment with a dry binder is a pastel; but when made of oiled chalk, it is called an oil pastel. It is the binder therefore that creates the big difference, which is exactly the same when we talk about paints; oil paint, acrylic paint etc. Wax crayons use wax and oil pastels use non-drying oil and wax as binders. Besides the composition of the colours, there is a huge difference in how a wax crayon and an oil pastel works, and it is only by experimenting with these materials that you will find out what their possibilities are. Don't forget there is a sliding scale between one thing and another. Coloured drawing slides into painting. We just get caught up in words and tend to think painting is one thing and drawing another, but when you look at these things as actions or events, you can see them as all intermingled aspects of one coloured material sticking to another in conjunction with the movements of an animal.

An old newspaper clipping looks at new uses for wax crayons

In the article above, if you enlarge it you can read about how wax crayons can become paints. Incidentally the article also advertises 'sculp-metal', a material Jasper Johns used to develop shallow relief versions of his flag paintings and drawings. A new material opens up a new possibility, as Johns put it, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that" or conversely, be part of a commingling with one group of things, then help bring in some more things and carry on by linking in some more stuff and following the implications.

In the USA you can find grease pencils, these are made of coloured and hardened grease, in England we call them chinagraph pencils.

Henry Moore

Because he liked to use wax resist techniques Henry Moore often used to use chinagraph pencils, in this case a black one for the line work and a white one for the highlights.

Chinagraph markers

You can use chinagraph markers to draw on a wide variety of surfaces, glazed ceramics, (hence the name), metals, as well as the glossy papers such as those used for printing. However it is its specific uses in various situations I'm particularly interested in. It was used in photographic editing to mark up contact sheets. This type of marking became associated with the act of selection itself.

Selected image from a photographer's contact sheet

Another use within photography was in the marking up of x-rays so that doctors could point to what was identified by the x-ray as going wrong.

A marked up x-ray

In the case of the photographer's contact sheet things are marked up because they are positive, interesting compositions or clear images that communicate something and in the case of the x-rays things are marked because something has gone wrong, in this case a broken bone.

During the second world war, grease pencils or chinagraph crayons were used in military aircraft control centres. As information came in from radar operators, details of aircraft locations and other information would be drawn in reverse on a clear panel of glass, which was readable to officers on the other side of the panel. This information would be continuously updated as a situation changed and because of the dynamics of this situation, it was often used as a prop or central location in war films.

The work of the chinagraph crayon has now been replaced by the Sharpie and other permanent marker pens, a drawing tool that tends to sit alongside the felt tip and ballpoint pens of this world when you are thinking about issues such as quality and associated meaning when choosing a drawing material.

Wax crayons because they are soft with no hard pointy bits such as nibs or thin graphite pencil tips, became the implement of choice for children, but grease pencils, which are also soft, became the implement of choice for the military, because you could write on glass with them. Their 'ur' histories are fascinating. The Binney and Smith chemical company used to make lampblack by burning whale bones and they also made the black colourant for automobile tyres. Because of their experience in working with colour and coloured manufacturing processes they eventually developed a line of wax crayons they called 'Crayola', a name Alice Binney came up with as a fusion of the French word for chalk, craie, with the first part of oleaginous, the oily paraffin wax used to make the crayons.

A combination of wax or grease with pigment is a very old one. Cave paintings were made with charcoal from a fire mixed with greasy fat from cooked meat, and the Egyptians made encaustic images using hot beeswax mixed with pigments and painted on to stone.

Paint sticks or oil sticks, oil bars or pigment sticks are all the same type of thing. They are made so that they can emulate the painterly qualities that you can get with oil paint and are relatively new materials designed to allow artists to be more expressive with their surface handling techniques. They are made from pure pigment, a drying oil (such as linseed or safflower oil) and enough wax to allow the mixture to be moulded into a cylindrical bar. They will dry and cure like oil paint and are fully compatible with traditional oil painting techniques. Almost any fine art support is suitable including canvas, paper and wooden or aluminium panel. Once marks have been made with an oil stick, they can be manipulated with a palette knife or a brush or extended with an oil medium. Some artists dip their oil sticks directly into linseed oil before using to get much softer marks. George Condo likes to draw with oil sticks and then uses a stiff brush to soften and blend the marks.

George Condo using oil sticks

George Condo: finished oil stick drawing

Oil pastels occupy a place between wax crayons and oil sticks. Like oil sticks they are made with pigment, wax and oil, but their oil content is considerably lower and a non-drying oil is used. The big issue is that there is no 'dryer' mixed in with the oils, which means you can keep them exposed to the air for ages and they will still work, but this also means that the surface of a drawing made by them is also not fixed and can always be smudged. Most artists store their oil pastel work under sheets of glassine paper, a smooth, grease-resistant paper.

Roger Hilton: oil pastel on envelope

Terry Frost: Oil pastel on graph paper

When I began my teaching career one of my fellow lecturers was a painter called Patrick Oliver, he had been closely associated with the St Ives art scene in the 1950 and 60s and was a strong advocate of oil pastels as a medium to use when thinking through painting ideas. He knew both Roger Hilton and Terry Frost and both artists made much use of a product that was very much of its time. The very first oil pastels were made in 1925 by Sakura and named Cray-Pas because they were a cross between crayons and soft pastels. They were often used for sketching as they were so convenient to carry and you can build them up in layers and scratch back through them, a technique that became a sort of trademark approach.

A scratched through oil pastel surface

My craft option for my DipAD was printmaking and at the time lithographic printing using both limestone and zinc plate technologies were important techniques to learn. This is where I first came across the use of lithographic crayons to draw with. I hadn't realised how they had effected the look of many images I had thought of before as simply crayon or pastel drawings. Lithographic crayons have a high oil content and are available in pencil and stick (like Conte crayon) forms. The crayons come in varying degrees of hardness. Lithographic crayons are made of beef tallow, Marcel soap, soot (carbon black), beeswax, and shellac. When these tallow and soap ingredients are applied to the zinc plate or stone, they stick to the surface and their oily consistency repels water, so that when you roll ink over a water soaked plate, it will only stick to the drawn areas.

Kathe Kollwitz: Lithographic print

Paula Rego: Lithographic print

Both Kathe Kollwitz and Paula Rego have used lithographic crayons very effectively and you can see the relationship between its use as a printing medium and how its use influenced their own approaches to drawing. However lithographic crayons have a quality that sits somewhere between oil pastels and chalks, and soft pastels and chalks have a different set of associations and material qualities and like coloured pencils can be grouped together as 'dry' materials and these will no doubt form the basis of a future post, but in the meantime you could check out other posts that focus on drawing materials.

Drawing

Friday 6 March 2020

Wax crayons and oil pastels

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