Anton's Special Sunday: Drawing in Black and White

Recently, Art Studio team member Anton Kaplan designed a Special Sunday program for museum guests. They planned the event, prepared materials, and facilitated the art making in the Art Studio. The following is their description of the project.

For this special Sunday project, Drawing in Black and White, guests were asked to explore a variety of drawing materials using neutral colors.

To start the project each guest was given both a white and black piece of Bristol paper to make their drawings on. Each group was prompted with the idea of experimenting with texture, tone, and contrast using different shades of black, white, and grey. Participants were invited to take ideas from various picture books, each of which were illustrated using a neutral palette, and were spread around the tables. Each table was covered with white paper as a kind of “testing space” for guests to experiment with the various pencils, crayons, and pastels that were provided. At each station the drawing materials were separated into three baskets of lights, darks, and greys with a wide variety of mediums available between them.

A particularly wonderful moment occurred when a child picked up a silver metallic crayon and was amazed to find that the crayon appeared to be a completely different color based on which paper they were drawing on. On the white Bristol paper the crayon appeared bright and silvery while on the black Bristol paper the crayon was dulled and had a greyish tint. The papers were both a similar Bristol paper, however due to the stark difference in color each drawing material would sit on the paper in a different way based on its material properties. This interaction illustrated one of the key concepts of this project, discovering ways to work within a simple palette in order to create a variety of visual and textural effects.