Another conte crayon sketch

conte crayon - from a few video pauses in the movie "Notting Hill"

I guess what made me start this one was the face of the girl with the big eyes, Emma Chambers, and then Rhys Ifans looked such a scruffy bastard that he got into the page.  Hugh Grant is there just to fill in the gaps, honestly.

Conte crayon again showing it's potential in getting down fairly quickly strong graphic images.  I love it.

According to my mates at Wikipedia "They were invented in 1795 by Nicolas-Jacques Conté" as a cheap drawing medium when graphite was in short supply.

I don't think that they are cheap now, compared to pencils or charcoal but they have a unique character and I would recommend them to anyone who likes drawing.

All of my efforts with the medium have been done in sketchbooks, and so I have only used conte on fairly smooth and cheap paper. According to the gurus a rough or textured paper gives the best results.
I guess this is another thing to put on my "to do" list.

Just in case you got here from a search engine look at the previous Kuraswa page. It shows a couple more of my large sketchbook pages that I did in Conte Crayon. Another one using conte crayon is here on my Kathe Kollwitz page. You may think black is the only colour, but not so. The crayons come in a range of really earthy colours, dark browns and ochres.

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"The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing... should be taught to every child just as writing is... " John Ruskin 1819-1900