As my final art project this year, I created a drawing of the northern lights, using crayola crayons. I'm very proud of this piece, due to the fact that I used such an unusual medium. Crayons are usually regarded as a small child's art tool, used to create nothing more sophisticated than simple doodles and stick figures. I've worked with crayons before, using the encaustic technique, which involves melting them over a paper placed on a hot surface, but this is the first time I've ever used plain crayons without any other techniques.

This is probably one of the fastest art projects; I completed the entire thing in under a week. I started by finding the image I wanted to base my drawing off of, which is available at this page. The picture has a nice blend of colours, which made my drawing have good visual appeal when it was created.

After I'd found a picture, I did a quick sketch of where I wanted the general elements to be. I sketched in the tent from the picture, and placed the lines of the boundaries of the northern lights. After sketching in the lines in pencils, I started actually colouring the project.

While colouring, I had a piece of looseleaf beside me, which I used a lot for testing how different colours of crayon blended together. I also had a pencil sharpener, which I used to keep the crayons sharp, so that I could keep my lines and shading clean and even. The tent took me one art class to complete, and the northern lights two. I really enjoyed the challenge of blending the colours together realistically. Ordinarily, colour blending isn't one of my stronger areas. I prefer pencil drawings over pencil crayons or markers, because I feel I'm generally more capable with greyscale drawings. However, I very much like the way my crayon drawing turned out.

This piece was used as a crossover for my final project for geography. We had to create a drawing of a Canadian landform. Even though northern lights aren't technically a landform, I think that the landscape is very much Canadian. I wanted to have my drawing be something unique, knowing that everyone in the class would be drawing mountains and rivers with common mediums such as pencils, pencil crayons, or paints. I'm definitely the only one to have chosen crayons, and my drawing has generated a lot of positive response.

I think that this piece of art is inspired by two sources. One is the encaustic style that I mentioned earlier. I've done encaustic work a handful of times before, and I love the way that you can make the colours as vivid or subtle as you like, simply by adding grey crayon or not, and blend so naturally. Encaustic is probably one of my favourite styles, because it's so unique and not widely used. The second source I believe I took inspiration from is Jeffrey Robert, an artist who focuses exclusively on crayons. His drawings are viewable here
7/17/2012 12:44:52 pm

Hey! I totally love this drawing. I happened to stumble upon this through twitter and took a look. This is amazing, I wish I could draw like this!

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8/29/2012 09:16:04 pm

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4/3/2013 07:55:35 pm

I have seen different kinds of art works using pencils, brushes etc. It is for the first time I see such a beautiful picture that is drawn using crayons. Crayons are usually regarded as small children’s tool. I think now people will change that opinion!

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7/20/2013 05:00:17 am

Thank you so much.

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