Coloured Pencils
Monday, March 30th, 2009Artists have been making marks for millennia, using natural pigments, burnt twigs, their fingers, coloured sands etc. Around 1662, a deposit of natural Graphite was discovered near Keswick, Cumberland, and this was used by masons to mark stones, and farmers to keep tallies of sheep. It took around 200 years to work out that this was a bit messy to handle, and to discover a way of embedding graphite strips between two pieces of wood, thus turning the crayon into a pencil. Coloured pencils, which are not based on graphite at all, but which have cores made from wax or oil based binders with various pigments mixed in, were not invented until the 1920’s, with Derwent, for example, producing its first range of 24 coloured pencils in 1939. They have struggled ever since to be taken seriously as an art medium—but are now beginning to gain recognition.