Color & Mark: Exploring Drawing Materials

This three-hour workshop is a drawing sampler designed to demystify the gorgeous array of colored drawing materials available to artists. You'll experiment with chalk pastels, pan pastels, oil pastels, colored pencils, and wax oil crayons on a variety of surfaces, discovering what each medium does best. The focus is on play and exploration: pushing the color range each material offers, testing different mark-making techniques, and experimenting with layering and blending.

Drawing is one of humanity's oldest forms of communication, beginning with cave paintings made from natural earth pigments—black charcoal, brown ochre, white chalk, silvery graphite. As human-made pigments expanded, so did our appetite for more color. Today's colored drawing materials blur the line between painting and drawing. They're uniquely portable, endlessly combinable with other dry and wet media, and capable of everything from quick gestural marks to richly layered compositions.

You don't need to be skilled at drawing from life or have a background in painting or color theory. This workshop is about discovery, experimentation, and finding new ways to work with color and your hands.

All skill levels welcome. Materials provided!