I’ve continued to enjoy grid journaling, and this time of year choosing a subject was obvious: trees. Shown above, I more recently did trees from my walks at Huntington State Park, and shown below, at the end of October, I did a page spread of trees from our yard.

To make this project simple and portable, I chose a minimum of materials: my artist crayons and some Posca markers. What I didn’t expect was to love the combination of these two so much!

I own these two materials for very different reasons. The Posca markers embellish, tidy up, and sign my acrylic work, and as actual acrylic paint, they go over anything. I own the wax artist crayons for wax resist techniques I use in paintings and collage papers. I have never used these two on their own in combination, and I was delighted by both the process and result. I have continued past the grid journal now, and painted another tree on its own in this method on a large piece of paper (shown below).

Also shown below are photos of these materials. The wax artist crayons are Caran D’Ache NeoColor I (buy my set of 40 here). They are buttery, and nicer in coverage than your average Crayola; they can go down densely, and pack a good color punch. You can layer them for more variety of color, and they come in a nice red tin container for easy portability. I’ve been sketching in each vignette with these first, and finishing with some emphasis and mark making with the acrylic Posca pens (buy a set of eight here).  (And since someone will ask, the sketchbook I’m using is this one.)

I hope you give it a try. It feels more like painting than drawing, but is a no fuss, no mess approach you can take or do anywhere. This is a great way to quickly get down the essence of an image or idea.