About
Welcome to 64 Shades of Wax, where drawing is fun again.
“64 shades of what?” you ask? By wax we mean that drawing material we all indulged in for hours as a child but for the most part have put aside as adults– the crayon.
“Why 64?” While crayola now has boxes of crayons with up 170 shades, for us the box of 64 is the one that brings us back to those early years of creative excitement. Do you remember the joy of a new box of crayons? How they smelled? How they looked?
This project aims to explore creativity though the limitation of a forgiving and comforting medium, the crayon. Each week for the next 64 weeks we will choose one crayon from Crayola’s box of 64 and find something fun to do with it. From opposite sides of North America, Ariel and Ashley will put to the test the powers of Wisteria and Cobalt and everything in between.
In addition to our own work we want to see your tests too! Each Monday when we post our creative works we’ll also post the color for the following week. You find something to do with it and post your results to our Flickr group.
About us:
Ashley once had an art professor describe her work as “the beauty of ineptitude.” For Ashley, this project is an excuse to embrace that ineptitude and, maybe, work on her drawing along the way. No longer laboring under the watchful eye of an art professor, Ashley works for a research and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. She loves her job, but thinks her coworkers will think she’s weird if she starts taking notes in crayons. It is not that kind of office.
Ariel does most of her drawing on a computer screen and is looking forward to the tactility and smell of crayons. She is currently a student of Architecture in Vancouver, B.C. She is hoping that this project will get her drawing more and thinking less, escaping that woeful plight of former liberal arts students. Don’t worry, Ariel has also had her own share of art criticism. The same professor Ashley mentioned once described Ariel’s work as “not particularly compelling” and “more trite that I thought it would be.”