Conte Crayons 24 Pack -Assorted Colours Hard Pastel- Presentation Box

Product Information

Colors sets are especially useful for field studies and color studies. Some artists create entire paintings with them, using them more like pastels than like a drawing medium. They are also used often to sketch under pastel paintings or lay down initial layers before using dry pastels. Colors can be layered to produce different hues or values. Color Conté mixes better on paper than many hard pastel products. It might seem risky to generalize about the ups and downs of a career with an artist whose working span lasts ten years and is over at age thirty-one. By most standards, though, Seurat’s career was tremendously full. Besides his two hundred and thirty or so mature drawings (about double the number in the exhibition), he made a string of major oil paintings which, right up to his death, show a continual development in his thinking. He produced as well numerous landscape and seascape paintings and a larger number of small oil sketches. Along the way he was instrumental in creating a style of painting which had a following in his lifetime that stretched beyond France and included Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro (for a while) in its ranks.

If you are intimidated by drawing, transferring images is a great way to start getting familiar with the shapes and strokes of drawing. When learning how to draw with perspective, tracing an image can give you a better understanding of what you are trying to draw. You will help train your eye to see some of the nuances required when drawing in perspective. Since they have square edges, these crayons are more suitable for rendering detailed artwork with sharp and fine lines. Plus, they do not leave a lot of dust and debris, keeping your artwork neat and free from messy smudges.

Juan Gris (Spanish, 1887–1927). Pears and Grapes on a Table, 1913. Oil on canvas, 21 × 29 in. (55 × 73 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection

They are frequently used on rough paper that holds pigment grains well. They can also be used on prepared primed canvases for underdrawing for a painting. Conté crayons are hard and have square edges, making them more suitable for detailed hatched work as opposed to the bolder painterly drawing style demanded by soft pastels. Conte crayons are unique and far different from the usual wax crayons. Everything about them stands out, from the bar shape to the composition and lay down. The formulation of Conte crayons hasn’t changed much since the original. If anything, there’s more color variety now. The dry components are crushed into a fine powder and combined with the gum and wax or some grease. The bound mixture is then shaped into square bars and baked till hardened.

Artist Resources

Yet already in La Grande Jatte Seurat is getting cute. Summed up by their cookie-cutter silhouetted shapes, some of the figures undermine the work’s complex layout and profusion of colored dots. And all of Seurat’s significant paintings from the years that follow—works showing models in a studio, a woman at her makeup table, and café-concert and circus life—suffer to one degree or another from figures and faces that are simultaneously lifeless and too firm in their outlines. He was trying to get the look and spirit of advertising into his art, and he was clearly seeing where the decorative, syncopated appearance of posters, where figures are summed up by the superstylized outlines of their facial features and bodies, would take him. The Met’s Parade de cirque (1887-88), with its fairy-tale light, is a fairly enchanting work, but his later pictures in general are emotionally inert, the figures little more than manikins. If your artwork involves extra fine details, or you just hate the square shape of Conte crayons and prefer the pencil format, Conte drawing pencils are an option. Conte crayons can be anything you want, from something as basic as a pencil for sketching to the primary medium for a detailed fine art piece with effects. It all depends on the results you want, whether defined linework or a painterly drawing.