A Nest

2010. Conte crayon.

A Nest is a conte crayon drawing done in my Portfolio Art I class in the year of 2010. The assignment was to draw one of several nests put on display in the center of the desk, along with eggs, broken or whole. The nests were on top of white bedsheets over boxes. We had to use conte crayons for our medium.

My drawing features a nest made of brown twigs, and a large chicken egg. It was not my nest of choice to draw, but other students took the other eggs and I could not get a good view point to draw the other nests. The nest was in fact "falling" over the edge of the box to the lower box below it, where the egg rests. Unfortunately, the paper got folded during the moving process, as you can see in the bottom of the photo.

This piece was quite frustrating to complete-I had trouble making realistic sheet folds, and I had trouble making the twigs look.. well... "twiggy". Also, it is incredibly difficult to make an egg look like an egg. The drawing was not well received by my art teacher. She didn't like my egg, or how the nest was falling. She said my drawing was unbalanced and the egg was lost in darkness.However, despite the criticism, I grew to love the softness of the art medium and the composition of the art piece.

(c) Maranda L. Scott