The word “crayon” refers to a miscellany of dry drawing materials—pencils, chalks and pastels. Today, in English, the term “crayon” is associated with waxy or greasy drawing sticks.
The first crayons appeared in Europe and were made with charcoal and oil. One source says that Pliny the Elder, a Roman scholar, described the first techniques of drawing with wax crayons. Pastels were used by Leonardo da Vinci in 1495.
Between 1796 and 1800, Alois Senefelder experimented with numerous lithographic crayon formulation and patented his invention in 1798, that resulted in the more continuous and consistent production of the sort of greasy sticks of lampblack used to draw on lithographic stones.
In the late 18th century, Nicolas-Jacques Conté invented French drawing pencil, made of an admixture of graphite and clay named after him Conté crayon. He also invented the modern lead pencil.
In 19th century other pigments appeared (not just charcoal) and Jane Austen mentioned crayons in her “Pride and Prejudice” in 1813. Joseph Lemercier of Paris manufactured and sold a variety of crayon and color related products.
Georges Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist artist, in his drawing titled “The Garbage Picker”, uses crayons to block in large areas of dark and light tones, ultimately bringing his subject into recognition. Seurat found a way to vary the pressure of the tool so that the texture of the paper picked it up in different amounts.
In the United States, they were manufactured in the mid to late nineteenth century by many of the same companies who later entered the wax crayon market. In 1903, in United States Binney & Smith made the first box of Crayola crayons as a response to the need school children had for art supplies.
Crayon for drawing
