Last weekend, I went out shopping one last time for the holidays (I hope), and as usual, I ran into at least a dozen people I know, including a friend and her daughter. The daughter liked to draw and they were shopping for art stuff to buy her for Christmas. She picked up a drawing studio set that had Conte crayons and pencils in it, and asked me what I thought. I liked using those in college, but really hadn’t used them in a while. I suddenly really wanted some Conte Crayons.

Conte crayons (or drawing sticks) are a really compressed chalk. They don’t disintegrate like pastels do, and they aren’t really waxy like oil pastels. They do make a mess on your hands, but not as messy as regular chalks. You usually blend them with something called a tortillian, which is a pencil-shaped piece of compressed cardboard material. Her set had a couple of these included.

While her mom did a little bit more secret shopping, I had a fun time sitting with her at the little cafeteria at a store. We broke open her set of Conte, and I gave her some quick lessons in it’s usage. We both did some fabulous drawings in a short amount of time. In her sketchbook, she already had a very light, simple pencil sketch of an eagle. We used that to add some color with the Conte, as you see below.

Eagles are really incredible to see first hand. Once, as I was walking in a field with my children, an enormous bald eagle swooped down and grabbed a rabbit about 20 feet in front of us. We were both awestruck and terrified at the sight of this magnificent creature. Until you’ve had one swoop near you, it’s hard to even describe how large they are, and how powerful they feel at such a close range.

Elizabeth originally snapped a photo as it flew overhead near her house, then did the light pencil contour (edges only) sketch of the magnificent bird. We did some quick web surfing on my cell phone to see what colors a bald eagle is supposed to be, because her photo only gave us a silhouette view of the eagle. The lighting and angle at the time of the photograph really didn’t allow us much detail beyond the outline. That’s an issue with nature drawing. Nature doesn’t always stay still for you or pose for your photographs in ideal light. Thankfully, the internet can help us find additional pictures of the same subject in case we can’t see well enough from our photo or our memory to complete a drawing.

When you to color in a subject like a bald eagle, it’s important to study what your subject looks like carefully. Too many of us “know” in our minds that the bald eagle has a white head, and a dark brown-to-black body, but giving it a good color job is more complex than that. We only did a simple sketch, about 20 minutes tops, which was only enough to get the basics down, but we still wanted the basic colors of our bird to be fairly accurate. An eagle is not usually pure white on the head. I found with a subject like an eagle, you can get a more accurate color by putting down the shading first, then covering it with the white Conte pencil, and blending it with the tortillian. All we did for the shading is add some Pierre Noir Conte to the right edge of the eagle’s neck and head, and after we played around blending it until we got the effect we wanted. Sometimes we added a little more white to lighten it in some areas, and sometimes we added more black.

The eagle appeared to have something in it’s mouth but we didn’t have enough detail in her photograph to see what it was, and as a result the beak just seems off to me in hindsight, but I still like the way this drawing conveys the majesty of a Bald Eagle flying overhead.

I broke into sketching too, using the Conte in my sketchbook to draw one of my favorite sights and sounds at Christmas: the Salvation Army Bell Ringer. I always empty my pocket change into their kettle.

As I’ve said before, nature notebooking doesn’t have to be exclusively nature unless you want it to be. I tend to draw all things around me in my environment, including the Salvation Army Bell Ringer in front of the store we were in.

I started to draw this after she was asking how to draw something like brass. I showed Elizabeth how color from one object often reflects off of other objects, especially shiny ones. We may think in our minds, from our experiences, “Bells are Brass — grab the yellow or orange”, but it’s much more complex than that. For example, the bell ringer’s gloves were a leathery pink color, her scarf was red with some black threads, her coat was green, the kettle is red, the stand was a yellow enamel. All of these colors were bouncing off of that brass bell, in addition to the regular highlights from the light and the shadows too. Because the bell is round, and because I was only doing a semi-quick sketch (about 10-15 minutes), I wanted to emphasize the roundness of the bell by using lines that went in the direction of those curves. So, even when I added some black to the inside of the bell to give some shadows, I shaded in a curved line. After I added these colors, I blended it all together using a tortillian, using round strokes again to emphasize that the bell was round. I blended out a lot of the green, as it looked a little odd and out of place on the bell.

I think the fact that I cartoon came through in this picture, as it has a somewhat cartoonish feel to it. The bell ringer’s hand looks more like the hand of one of my cartoon characters, but again, we only were sitting there, sketching, for about 20 minutes at the most. I was still excited enough with our results to take some photos, and to put Conte Crayons on my Christmas list.