Swordwhale Walking: Illustration, stories, photojourneys, videos

Don't throw out that box of crayons just yet. Here's a few things you can do with them, and with other media you might not have thought of.

Somewhere I read that arctic peoples say orca and wolf are the same spirit, wearing different shapes for land and sea. The two animals are very similar in their social order, their intelligence, and their importance as predators at the top of the food web. This was a small piece (less than 12" x 12") done on a scrap of mat board. I used the color of the mat board (allowing it to show through the pencil lines) as part of the design. The orca's sleek skin and the wetsuit of my marine biologist were done in watercolor. The white is opaque watercolor. The wolf and husky, and the background textures are Prismacolor Pencil (a rich, juicy colored pencil).

For a portable mural for Nixon Park, I couldn't work on watercolor paper (vellum bristol, my favorite); it didn't come big enough. Stuck with basic brown wrapping paper, the only media that worked were dry media (watercolor or any other paint would have wrinkled the paper severely). Prismacolor was great for details, outlines, but too small for the expanse of the paper. I used crayons and chalk pastels for much of that, also using the color of the paper (it was, after all, a chipmunk burrow, underground) as part of the design.

Pet portraiture is quick and easy using a minimum of pencil colors on a delicious range of MiTientes paper ( a wonderfully textured "charcoal/pastel" paper). First I drew the young grey mustang with regular pencil, outlined with black Prismacolor, added shading in Prismacolor, added the white highlights in Prismacolor. In watercolor, you use the white of the paper for your highlights; here, I used the warm grey color of the paper as part of the horse's color.

This portrait of a favorite horse of mine (Bazraf: a Welsh pony Arabian cross), was done from a photo (I usually use a dozen or more pictures, as one photo can lie). He was a pale grey (as grey horses age, they get whiter), so I drew him on darker paper than "Yatalii", and used white Prismacolor. The blue "faerie fire" or aura is also Prismacolor. Sometimes I use a bit of opaque white watercolor. Again, the color of the paper is allowed to show through.

Salamanders (this is a redbacked salamander, native to Pennsylvania's soil) have smooth skin; they're amphibians, not reptiles, but their color isn't smooth as a new car. I wanted a bit more than the textures of watercolor would give me, so I used white crayon, scribbled on first, to resist the watercolor I applied later.