National Sharpen Your Pencil Day

My nephews have been on a mission... they wanted to declare a new holiday, National Sharpen Your Pencil Day on March 1. They challenged everyone on my sisters blog to join in on the celebration and their friends tell their friends, and well the rest is history.

We gathered our 20 year old colored pencils. Yes seriously, I remember buying these Prismacolor pencils when I was an art student at Ball State University. It was quite purchase for me at the time, and I had always wanted a set when visiting the campus bookstore or our local art supply store in Indianapolis. As the years went by after graduating, I used them but not as much as I did when in college, more of a hobby use just due to working full-time. But when when my daughters and I started drawing, cross-hatching and color shading, I brought the dearly loved Prismacolors out. It has been one of the best learning and art tool in our home. And of course, they are always dull just due to the daily use. They are not in the tiered package/box anymore but that is ok because they are getting a lot of good use out of them.

A few months ago, I pulled out an old college project of mine that I had in one of my portfolios. I thought it might be helpful so that the girls could get a better understanding of how color shading and cross-hatching could be applied in their artwork, just allowing them to add a little depth to a particular shape. Of course, they were all over this idea and the art geek totally came out in me.

During one of my night clases, the project was to bring in various candy wrappers. So amongst the 20 of us in the art class, we had a wide array of selections to choose from that was to be recreated in our drawing. We could take any angle of the wrapper, draw it on our art board but we had to use at least 8 different wrappers in our project.



The plastic overlay that is on top of the drawing is causing a tinted cast to the photograph with the white mat board around around it. Might also be due to the fact it is also taken off of my cell phone. But thought you might enjoy seeing the different angles that were taken when working with eight different candy bar wrappers, and the various angles that could be taken to make an interesting drawing.


As a huge fan of the handmade community I wandered over to etsy to see the various colored pencil themed items I might find, and created a colored pencil treasury in honor National Sharpen Your Pencil Day.