Many artists are familiar with Conte crayons, at least in their traditional red iron oxide stick or black and white form. Sanguine drawing crayons have been around since Leonardo da Vinci, and sketches done with them have a warm, classical look that’s irresistible on white or colored paper. Their texture is unique. Dry and soft, a little like pressed charcoal but cleaner, they can give a hard line by using the corner or smudge to very soft shading. A white Conte crayon is great for highlighting charcoal drawings on neutral toned paper. But were you aware that these expensive yet addictive little crayons also come in a wide range of brilliant colors along with the traditional white, gray, red-oxide, bistre (brown) and black?

is a Conte drawing done from life in light Sanguine, showing the warm realism iron oxide gives to caucasian skin tones. This is a typical Conte crayon drawing on white. It is much easier to get this effect in Conte than in sketch pencils or colored pencils because they smudge easily and show strong smooth value changes.

Traditional “trois couleurs” Conte drawing -- black and white on gray tinted paper or black, sanguine and white on buff -- is quick and easy to do. Being able to add in highlights with white makes them easy, but the results are dramatic and appeal to art buyers who have seen many similar drawings in art museums. Any recognizable rendition of a human face or figure in sanguine (red oxide) will carry a warm natural skin tone in the light values, read as “real” even if monochrome. Sanguine, bistre or black Conte drawings may sell faster or gain higher prices because the medium is so classy. Could the color Conte sets become just as useful?

:64643770: is a photo of my 48 color Conte crayon set, my 12 assorted Conte crayon set and 12 color Conte set next to each other, so you can see what I’m talking about. Packaging on Conte crayons is excellent, not one of these sets had a single broken stick when they arrived, unlike the cardboard-wrapped Conte Studio sets which should be kept in the studio flat right side up in a drawer with nothing on them -- the Studio sets do have a color set but do not even have clear plastic over the cardboard window on the thin cardboard box.

Good packaging is essential with anything resembling pastels, because otherwise you will spend money for a case to keep the supplies in -- unless you just keep them in the studio and never take them out. Conte crayons aren’t quite as bad as soft pastels or Nupastels for breakage, but they do break fairly easily -- and it’s always frustrating to find that quarter-inch piece in the color you wanted. Though with Conte crayons, I’ve used that quarter-inch piece in the past.

is a color chart made with the small 12 color set. With any new art supplies, I always start with a color chart. This shows me how they handle, how they blend -- and how they scan. Do any colors drop out on the scanner? The last three lines are blends of white and brown, white and tan ochre, and white and black to get two skin tones and a good gray.

The good news is that colored Conte crayons are exactly that -- colored Conte crayons. They behave exactly like sanguine Conte crayons, except that they come in other colors and lean heavily toward bright spectrum colors, with a good range of warm neutrals and a couple of grays.

They are not a price leader. You can find hard pastels in larger ranges with Faber-Castell Polychromos or Prismacolor Nupastel, you can find thicker square-stick soft pastels for much lower prices from Loew-Cornell. So what makes Conte crayons so special that they’re worth paying a list price of $22.83 for a twelve color set?

Conte crayons get much finer detail than any other type of pastel or pastel-like stick medium I know of, short of charcoal. You can use Conte crayons to get effects as detailed as graphite, if you are patient and use tortillons or stumps. They are compact and clean, even the relatively dustless Nupastels aren’t as clean as Conte crayons for outdoor sketching. You will get some color smudged on your fingers, especially if you finger-smudge your drawing, but it swipes off easily on a damp cloth and generally doesn’t get on anything else.

Their tiny size and sturdy packaging makes them extremely practical for carrying to class or on plein air trips. Warning -- if you saved money by getting the cardboard-package Studio set that includes three sketch pencils, kneaded eraser, stump and sharpener, turn the styrene tray upside down in the box before putting it in your backpack. Or tape the clear plastic wrapper over the open window, because otherwise the sticks in the middle will fall out and grind to dust in the bottom of your backpack.

Conte crayons blend well with each other. The bright spectrum colors may be a little intimidating, but any neutrals or muted colors you want can be created by mixing, especially if you use blenders or smudging. It’s easy to add multiple layers to a mixture, also they lift or erase easily. When testing mixed colors, I usually leave a wide matting margin around my artwork for color tests and then just crop that off on the scan or photo. This means I can test it on the same substrate.

Conte crayons are opaque enough to put light over dark effectively.

is a quick sketch done with my 12 color set. The white lines between the segments on the lower orange are white over orange and yellow, the white seeds on the watermelon slice are dashed in with white and the highlights on the grapes are smudged white over blue-violet and blue. Some of the yellow and yellow-green streaks on the apple were drawn right into the red to lengthen them. While not quite as opaque as streaking white gouache or oil paint into a multimedia piece, you can highlight strongly with white and light colored Conte crayons.

This gives them some versatility for sketching on the spot and for correcting and changing serious drawings and paintings. The inside corner of the watermelon slice is a mixture of pink and red, which created exactly the hue of ripe watermelon, shaded through pure pink to a slightly blued pale pink near the rind. With smudging a good range of hues is possible, and color mixing is intuitive. Try out your mixture ideas on scrap or margins until you get exactly the hue you want. A large set is great, but unlike many colored pencils or pastels, I would actually recommend the 12 color set to someone new to this medium. You can get great results with it, and then if you like it, pick up the larger range 24 or 48 color set.

Use a good workable fixative with Conte crayon drawings, whether sanguine/black/white or color. They do smudge and can be damaged by touching, also if you go heavily some powder may accumulate on the surface. This powder is easy to push around for smudging, but if you don’t want it, carefully turn the art upside down and tap it. If you just brush it away, you may get streaks in the direction you brush. These streaks are easy to clean up with a kneaded eraser by pressing and lifting or by rubbing, as long as they’re on bare paper areas of your art. Otherwise, you may have to lift and then rework some areas.

A final coat of fixative will slightly intensify and deepen the colors. I tend to like that effect and keep it in mind while working, others may not. Handling it like charcoal is the best way to decide which fixative and how much to use. If you aren’t sure, make a test scrap in the colors of your drawing and try different fixatives till you like the effect. Putting a last thin layer on the drawing after using fixative may freshen your light areas if you feel the fixative darkened them too much. It’s a subtle effect though, and often goes unnoticed.

Warning: colored Conte crayon does not function well on Hahnemuhle velour board or Hahnemuhle velour paper. While the soft thick pile of velour paper is great for soft pastel, it slides right off a Conte crayon stick without picking up the pigment. It just polishes it. I started a piece with color Conte crayon on black velour board and switched to Nupastel, which had the same problem -- the hard corner grooved the velour paper with hardly any color laydown. I gave up and used soft pastels on it. Velour paper is for soft pastels. It’s wonderful for them and will carry many layers, allowing a rich painting to emerge -- but don’t even bother trying to sketch under that with colored Conte or any hard pastels. Pastel pencils do work on velour paper or board, so use those for details if you try velour paper and save your Contes.

Conte crayons lend themselves to a loose style of smooth smudged areas like watercolor washes punctuated by sharp defined marks like charcoal, but can also be used for spectacular realistic effects and textures. Experiment with different marks and blenders until you find your own style. I discovered that the way Conte crayons handle, it stimulated me to use more variety in my marks and a looser, more spontaneous line than graphite or colored pencil. You may find minimalism and quick sketching or color studies easier in this medium because the combination of control and full pigment saturation gives dramatic results quickly, discouraging overworking just to get the effect you wanted.

Most art papers work well with colored Conte crayons, including tinted papers like Canson Mi-Tientes, Ingres paper or Strathmore Art Paper. Hot press watercolor paper or smooth Bristol board will hold Conte crayons but I prefer some tooth, such as vellum Bristol, sketchbook paper or Mi-Tientes.

The following demonstration is on Canson Mi-Tientes, #490 Light Blue. My photo reference is Stock Photo 6 by ~Macadamia-Nuts. Here’s the thumbnail:



I marked up a 9” x 12” sheet with 1” borders for a finish size of 7” x 10” to allow matting room, and color tests along the edges. Because Conte crayons are an excellent sketch medium in themselves, I am not sketching under them with graphite. That might groove the paper or show through on the final surface, though you can if you like.

Stage One is a light sketch in black, just to establish darks and place the subject. I can see that I’ll have to do something cool with the ripples on the water or the composition won’t quite look right. That or crop it to 5” x 7” and keep the duck the main subject. I could finish this as a loose drawing with some white highlights and post it as a Deviation, but I want to use the full color range in my 12 color set and demonstrate mixing.

Notice that like charcoal drawing, Conte crayon sketches are dark enough to scan easily and post. This makes loose drawings a lot easier to display online and also makes them more dramatic when matted and hung.

In Stage Two, I roughed in most of the color except the duck’s beak, going lightly except in areas I know will be fully saturated like the duck’s body and head. The shore reflections in the photo reference seem to be dark olive greens and browns, so I mixed the dark brown and green in them, then mixed blue-violet and blue in the blue sky reflections and lightly danced around them in white for highlights. I didn’t follow the reference exactly, so I’m not sure how well the water reflections will come out. Do not use fixative at this stage! It’s important to do all your smudging before any light coat of fixative is applied, or your marks may remain rough as they are in this stage.

Everything from Stage Two is blended carefully with a chamois. Finger smudging lifted too much color, so I went to the chamois. It’s not precise, for more definition on shapes I’ll switch to a stump or back to fingers later on. This stage is important to see so that you can tell you didn’t ruin your art by all the blending. Blend vigorously, but keep it to specific color areas like the dark shore reflections, water highlights, blue water reflections, the duck’s back, the duck’s head. Use a clean part of the chamois or a new tortillon for each distinct color area to avoid muddying the tones. Clean up any slopover with a kneaded eraser and rework if necessary.

Stage Four. The duck is finished or nearly finished, eye highlight has been added in to make his eye visible. More layers of brown, blue-violet, black, blue and green have been worked into the neck, smudged with a sharp pointed tortillon and then reworked so it’s fully saturated and shimmering with color. The back has been reworked thoroughly and lightly smudged, then reworked with a few more distinct strokes to hint at feathers. The shadows and reflections in the water are strengthened, the highlights in the water much strengthened, but the blue sky-reflections are too strong and need to be muted. Scanning at penultimate stages can sometimes show whether something that looks fine in the hand is too garish online. One more round of mixing and smudging in the water, then it’s ready to sign and spray with fixative.

is the completed Deviation, Male Mallard. I added some bright orange to the beak for sparkle, some light yellow-green to the neck for sparkle, strengthened the narrow shadow at the waterline and other details, tweaked the water and shaded some of the shore reflections with green and brown in distinct areas to give more of an impression of reflections. Then I signed it in a way that helped balance the composition, used fixative and did a high-resolution scan so as to make prints.

Smudging tools were fingers, chamois and tortillons. Colors used were white, black, blue-violet, brown, tan, green and light green, orange, yellow. The range of muted colors and mixed values shows in this piece along with the versatility of soft and hard marks. Despite the overwhelming brightness of the color Conte spectrum sticks, it’s possible to get gentle, subtle color gradations by mixing and smudging.

While open stock color sticks are not available anywhere online that I know of, some art stores may carry them. The insert on the package claims Conte crayons are available in a full range of 70 colors, this may include the broad range of grays shown in a second assortment and all four of the sanguine hues as well as the different hardnesses in black and white. Colored Conte crayons are as clean, portable and easy to use as their red, black and white counterparts. They’re great for color studies while planning serious oil, acrylic or pastel paintings, or as a medium in their own right on white or tinted paper.

Like most quality art supplies, they’ll pay for themselves fast when you’ve got the skill to do anything realistic. A specialized 12 color Portrait set is also available at Dick Blick and a specialized 12 color Landscape set is available as well, but I haven’t found it online anywhere.

I hope this article has proved useful in helping you decide whether to try these expensive yet versatile art supplies.