The Art of Crayon shows us how artist Jane Davenport takes crayons, acrylic paint and imagination and creates the beautiful wide-eyed faces that she is becoming famous for.
Neocolor soluble crayons create dreamy effects.
JOURNALING IN COLOR
“I am an artomologist,” Jane Davenport announces, happily defining herself as the only one of her kind in the world. And it’s true because her artwork is as unique as her self-proclaimed title.
A Davenport fairy loosely drawn with crayon on a painted background
Jane “Danger” Davenport’s style combines high fashion and whimsical imagination, often in the form of dreamy faces of impish fairy folk and fierce glamour girls. She achieves her colorful, wide-eyed images through a process of mixing acrylic paint with crayon on the pages of the journals she creates with cold-pressed watercolor paper.
White crayon marks are striking on a dark background.
Davenport leans toward using water-soluble Neocolor II crayons. You can hear the excitement in her voice when she talks about the vibrancy of juxtaposed pigments before and after they’re smudged, blended, and transformed. In her drawings, the background color often merges with the subject, heightening the ethereal playfulness and not-quite-of-this-world-ness of the characters she creates.
When she was growing up, Davenport says, she was fortunate to have a family that supported her art endeavors. She has vivid memories of her parents supplying her with a fine-art colored pencil set with its own special sharpener and case. She recognized even then that these were not the ordinary pencils that the other kids had. So, from a very young age, she learned to appreciate the quality of color. And she learned that art materials are treasured tools that add to your sense of pride in the work you create.
A Davenport fantasy figure painted and colored on printed paper
Defining Interests
The best-selling author of Beautiful Faces (Quarry Books, 2015), and a tireless teacher of her online Art Schools and Escape Artist retreats, Davenport’s passion is in teaching and showing others how to “defy their creative gravity,” she says. “If you are willing to take risks, others will see it and feel it.” She runs her successful art business from her “nest” in Byron Bay, Australia.
As with many artists, Davenport circled through a range of interests before finding “the one.” She got her start in fashion, and was working as a fashion photographer in Europe when she mounted her gallery series The Ladybird Chronicles, a series of sixty-four enormous photographs of insects, which toured three continents.
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Create astonishing artwork with crayons!
Crayons aren’t just for kids anymore!Sculptors use them whole, bundling thousands of crayons to create environmental and installation-size sculptures. Carvers pierce and reshape crayons with scalpels, turning them into mini totems, helixes, and portrait busts. Landscape and still-life artists layer crayon shades in works on paper that rival paintings in their subtlety and depth. What will you do?!
The Art of Crayon will guide you through a gallery of works by contemporary artists who use crayons as a diverse and dynamic medium. Each chapter includes a specific style of crayon artwork, complete with engaging projects from author Lorraine Bell to help you learn different techniques. From sculpture, to carving, to melted wax and drawing, you’ll soon become a master crayon artist!
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