How to draw the figure using Conte crayon, September 2013

Conté is a tricky medium – sometimes it acts more like charcoal and sometimes it acts like a crayon. That’s not unusual when you consider that conte’ is a combination of graphite or charcoal and wax. It was invented by Frenchman Nicolas-Jacque Conté in 1795.

When I draw with conté I try to use a lighter touch, otherwise my drawing gets too dark, too quickly. My better efforts have been on textured, colored charcoal paper. Conté comes in a variety of colors, but for figure drawing I prefer sanguine and white for highlights. It helps to have a great model as I did in my drawing seen here, ‘Heroic Male with Sword’.

Michaelangelo used red chalk (prior to the creation of conté) for preliminary sketches for his paintings. You can view this sketch in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art at: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/337497