Like pastel, gouache and various drawing media, colored pencil is an artist’s medium that doesn’t receive the level of recognition its adherents would like.

In part it shares the relative fragility and light exposure issues of works on paper (though materials are now being subjected to lightfastness tests), but largely colored pencil in particular suffers from an image problem, the impression that it’s not a “serious” medium.

The Colored Pencil Society of America is an organization founded in 1990 to promote the use of colored pencil, provide exhibition opportunities for its membership and in general elevate the perception of colored pencil as a medium.

To these ends, the society organizes two shows each year, the International Exhibition, in which the medium for accepted works must be only colored pencil, and the Explore This! Exhibition, in which the primary medium for works must be colored pencil, but allows for the incorporation of other media, surfaces and techniques not allowed in the International Exhibition.

The society hosts galleries of the award winners in both exhibitions, going back several years. Unfortunately, the website is not well organized (you must drill down into the Galleries page, then to the individual listings and then to the individual year before seeing images, and from there navigation disappears except for a Home link).

Here are the gallery lists for the International Exhibitions and the Explore This! exhibitions.

Once into the galleries, you will find examples of colored pencil being used in ways you may not have expected if you haven’t been keeping up with the medium. Like work in pastel, much of it is more like painting than drawing, and furthers the notion that both could be thought of as dry painting mediums.

The society’s website provides a list of links to member websites.

There is an article on The Artist’s Magazine blog about the recent CPSA awards dinner, which prompted this post.

There is also a smaller, UK Colored Pencil Society, and Katherine Tyrrell, herself a proponent of the medium, lists other colored pencil societies and exhibitions on her Squidoo lens for colored pencil resources.

(Images above: Linda Lucas Hardy, Gregory Joy, Deborah Friedman, Jaclyn Wukela, Cecile Baird, Marge Dreher, Catherine Gauldin, Ester Roi, David Billingsley, Pat Averill, Kare Williams, Linda Koffenberger, Shawn Falchetti)

Pastel is a fascinating medium that traverses the boundaries of both drawing and painting. In the hands of portrait artist Simone Bingmer it falls into the latter category, taking on the refined appearance of oil painting, but with a textural surface quality unique to the dry medium.

Bingmer lives and works in Cologne, Germany. She starts the portrait process with a phase she calls brainstorming. This is a search for the sitter’s personality that involves conversation and the taking of numerous reference photographs. From there she proceeds with an initial pencil drawing, which is then enlarged and transferred to canvas as the basis for the pastel painting.

Bingmer’s website features a gallery of her portraits of children, men, women and animals. She appears to find her greatest inspiration in portraits of women and young girls. The former allow her to engage in elegant rendering and classical compositions, the latter have the most emotional resonance, with her young sitters often displaying a vibrant force of personality.

The images in her gallery are linked to somewhat larger versions, but some of the most fascinating images are only available in the Flash slideshows that are at the top of the home page and other non-gallery pages. In those you can see larger details of the portraits that show the surface texture and her adept handling of the medium.

Minnesota artist Tiona Marco does landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, still life, wildlife and botanical drawings, all in her medium of choice, Crayola Crayons.

That’s right, good ol’ big yellow box of ‘em, wax in paper wrappers, wears down to a nub in your hands, drew with ‘em when you were five, Crayola Crayons. She doesn’t add other mediums, melt the wax or otherwise manipulate them, she has simply become very adept at handling wax crayons as a medium.

It was an email from Tiona, letting me know about her work, that prompted my post yesterday about Crayola Crayons as an art medium.

Marco earned a degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and was teaching art to elementary school children in Mexico, where she had few resources for her own artistic endeavors, but access to plenty of crayons. She began to experiment with the potential of crayons to create art and on returning to the U.S. had a fortuitous encounter with Don Marco, an artist who had already mastered the use of Crayola Crayons as a medium.

Don Marco took on Tiona as an apprentice and Tiona, on establishing herself as an artist, took on her mentor’s last name as her own professional name.

Tiona Marco’s web site has galleries of her work in several categories, along with a brief bio. Most of the works have links indicating if the original is available for purchase, and often offering prints as well.

Many of the pieces are accompanied by comments. The image above, left, for example, is both part of a series of drawings of women in hats, and a nod to her fondness for the work of Vermeer.

Marco also has a blog, in which she discusses how she got into wax crayons as a medium, and offers several videos in which she explains some of her techniques, as well as giving advice on how to care for an original done in wax crayons.

Leonardo da Vinci is one of those artists, like Rembrandt, Monet or Van Gogh, who is obscured from us by the brilliance of his fame.

It is almost impossible to look at Leonardo without the attendant baggage of his reputation as the ultimate embodiment of the Renaissance, one of the most brilliant minds in history, and the creator of iconic images; including what is arguably the most famous painting in the World, the Mona Lisa (which I have attempted to show you with fresh eyes in my post La Giaconda (The Mona Lisa), flipped for your viewing pleasure).

Leonardo, despite his reputation as an inventor, proto-scientist, anatomist, and philosopher, was primarily an artist. To look at him as an artist, as freshly as we can, perhaps we should step back to that most basic of an artist’s skills, drawing.

Even here, Leonardo’s reputation confounds us; even his drawings are famous, from the iconic Virtruvian Man, to his drawings for flying machines, weapons of war or fantastically advanced notions like submarines and helicopters. His notebooks are the most renowned collections of sketches, drawings and notes in the world. Some of his drawings from them are among the most famous in the world and have been reproduced widely, even animated.

To most artists, drawings are an exploration of the visual world and their response to it, and preparatory studies for finished works. To Leonardo they were that and more; explorations of scientific inquiry, logistics, inventiveness, anatomical study, investigations of motion and natural phenomena, and an essential tool in his relentless quest to know and understand the world around him.

So we step back again, and try to look at his drawings simply as those of an artist, to see if we can get to know him on that level; drawing what he saw with the materials at hand, largely pen and ink and silverpoint, and less frequently, chalks.

Here, in the details of his firm line work, delicate shading and expressive textures, perhaps we can meet Leonardo the artist; observing, studying and interpreting the world before his eyes with uncanny intensity and consummate skill.

Here we see his mastery of tone, his robust draftsmanship, but ultimately his struggle as an artist, like that of most serious artists, to make his skill the measure of the fantastic wonders of the world he wanted to portray.

There is a site devoted the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci with about fifty of his drawings. A better selection, though not as easy to navigate, can be found on the Web Gallery of Art (if an image doesn’t come up in the pop-up when you click for the detail image, try reloading the pop-up window).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a selection of Leonardo’s drawings as part of a previous exhibit. I’ve listed some other online resources below.

Also, see my previous post The Face of Leonardo?, in which I talk about how Siegfried Woldhek analyzed Leonardo’s catalog of drawings to find those that most likely qualify as self-portraits.

There are a number of books devoted to Leonardo’s drawings. The inexpensive Dover edition, Leonardo Drawings, is viewable online through Google Book Search.

The second volume of the two volume set, Leonardo da Vinci, Vol I: The Complete Paintings; Vol II: Sketches and Drawings by Frank Zollner is beautiful, contains many of his well known and lesser known drawings, nicely reproduced and remarkably inexpensive. Though, not listed in print on Amazon, you can find it online, sometimes even discounted new, or even cheaper used.

Leonardo’s Notebooks, edited and arranged by Anna Suh, is more an appreciation than a catalog, and features many of his translated writings along with the sheets to which they relate.

There are numerous other books on Leonardo’s drawings and his notebooks. Many of them quite inexpensive; so don’t be deterred by the fact that Bill Gates at one point paid over 30 million dollars for one his original notebooks, the Leicester Codex, making it the most expensive book ever purchased.

My wife and I were in New York City on Saturday; and while walking through Columbus Circle we came across Daniel Hauben, his French easel balanced on the edge of a fountain, painting a complex and large scale pieln air painting of a view down Eighth Avenue.

Most often, plein air painting is associated with relatively small paintings that can be finished in one session, and a short session at that given the degree to which light can change a scene in a matter of a few hours. Presumably, Hauben works on paintings of this size and complexity over the course of perhaps several days, but I was still surprised to see an artist taking on a painting like this in such a busy public space.

I asked Hauben for his card, but didn’t distract him beyond that with questions, and looked up his web site when I got home. His confidence in taking on this kind of challenge comes from over 25 years of plein air painting, largely in the Bronx, but also in other states in the U.S. as well as several other countries around the world.

Hauben paints primarily in oil for his cityscapes, both plein air and in even more complex studio works that often depict large scale panoramas of the city.

Some of my favorites, though, are his richly textured and strong-hued pastel landscapes of more rural scenes. There is also a section of landscapes in oil, easy to miss as it’s only linked from the bottom of the page of pastel landscapes.

Likewise, it’s easy to miss the section of street scenes linked from the bottom of the cityscapes page, and more street scenes linked from the bottom of that page.

There is also a section devoted to Puerto Rican Life in the Bronx, others for portraits, world travels and September 11th, and section for graphics as well as work in bronze and oil relief paintings.

There is an interesting section outside the gallery, linked from the main navigation, for Inches From My Easel, excerpts from a series of anecdotes and stories of Hauben’s experiences over the course of painting on location for 25 years, and a section called Artist @ Work, with photographs of the artist painting on location across the Bronx and around the world.

Johnnie Scoutten is a designer and creative director who also paints and draws in a variety of media.

I’m not sure if she chooses the medium to suit her subject or whether she chooses the subject for how much fun it will be to render in the medium. I suspect it’s often the latter.

The image shown here, for example, is one of a series of similar close-ups of cat faces done in pastel and, in particular, in colored pencil on drafting film; a process she notes on her blog as particularly delightful.

I was just struck by the wonderful texture of the animals’ fur and the liquidly dimensional rendering of the cat eyes in the entire series. I was also amused by the close-up compositions; notably in that they are the kind of crops most often associated with portraits of people, and tend to emphasize the anthropomorphic character of the cats. The one above, in particular, looks like it could be a portrait of the CEO from the International Mousers Guild Annual Report.

Scoutten has a work in progress version of this image on her blog in which you can see the colored pencil lines going down over the gray background on the drafting film.

In addition to the blog, Scoutten has a web site with galleries of her work in pastel, oil, and acrylic; with subject matter ranging from still life, to florals, to landscape to renderings of vehicles. Some are quite painterly, others smoothly blended; but there always seems to be attention to achieving a textural quality that works to best advantage in matching the subject matter with the medium and approach.

Massimiliano Frezzato, (usually referred to, Elvis-style, as simply Frezzato) is a highly regarded Italian comics artist. Frezzato was born and lives in Torino, site of the current Winter Olympics. (how’s that for a topical tie-in?)

Although he has worked an a number of projects and short features he is best known as the artist of two major series, Margot, written by Jérôme Charyn, and in particular, Les Gardiens du Maser, written by Nikita Mandryka.

Frezzato seems to have been influenced by anime (occasionally his characters will exhibit the large doll-like eyes and head proportions seen in anime and manga), but his main influences are probably major European comics artists like Moebius and Enki Bilal.

Like Bilal, and to a lesser extent, Moebius, Frezzato’s work seems to be a mixed-media affair, combining pencils, inks, paint and colored pencils, crayons or chalks (image detail at left).

His work is at once realistic and cartoon-like, highly rendered and quickly gestured. His draughtsmanship can be restrained and straightforward and wildly exaggerated, often within the same story or even on the same page. (The image here shows him at his most restrained.)

There is a site devoted to the Maser series, with French and English versions, although the English version is offline as of this writing. It’s worth checking out, though; it contains some large (but watermarked) Frezzato images in the form of downloadable wallpapers, and the Albums section has thumbnail images that you can mouse-over to see small but beautiful previews of whole pages.

There is also a Frezzato gallery on Myrdhinn’s site, and the BDNet site (in French) includes a sample comics page linked from the detail page for most of the titles listed.

You can find the English translation versions of the Maser series in many U.S. comics shops and book stores. Here is an Amazon link to the first volume of the series: Second Moon (Keepers of the Maser Series, Volume 1).

There is also a Frezzato Sketchbook available, which I really enjoy. It contains preliminary drawings and penciled pages for his comics albums, as well as character drawings, random sketches and flights of fancy.

His work also occasionally appears in Heavy Metal, a comics magazine based on the French Metal Hurlant comics magazine.

Heavy Metal also publishes the U.S. versions of Frezzato’s comic albums.

Daniel E. Greene is widely recognized as one of the foremost portrait artists in the US. He has created portraits of numerous leaders in industry, government, academia, science, art, medicine and other areas, including Eleanor Roosevelt, astronaut Walter Schirra, author Ayn Rand and William Randolph Hearst. His work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the White House.

Greene works in oil for many of his portraits, but he is also a master of pastel, and many of his portraits are in that fascinating and challenging medium (images at left).

Pastel can be thought of either as a drawing medium, as in the very graphic pastels of Degas, or as a painting medium, as seen in the French pastel artists of the Rococo period. Greene works graphically at times, but his most striking work takes pastel well into the realm of painting.

Pastel is finely powdered pigment mixed with just enough gum or resin to bind it into a paste (hence the word “pastel”) and then molded into sticks. This is responsible for its brilliance, it is almost pure pigment, but also creates limitations. Because there is so little binder, at some point you run into a limit of how much pigment will adhere to the surface. To me, pastel’s limitations make work like Green’s pastel portraits even more impressive.

Greene was an instructor at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League of New York. He is the author of two books on pastel painting: Pastel and The Art of Pastel. Both of them are unfortunately out of print, but you may have luck finding copies of the former as it was in print for over 25 years.

There are also several instructional videos available on his site for both oil and pastel technique and he gives portraiture workshops in New York State.

In addition to portraits, his site also includes a well-known series of subway paintings, galleries of still life paintings and very nice figure paintings.

There is also an excellent gallery of his portrait work on the Masters of Portrait Art site given below.