These media have in common the fact that they are all media for drawing in line. This is one reason why they should never be allowed to take the place of paint in art teaching. Although paint can be used for drawing in line, it is more natural to use it to draw in mass, thinking in areas of a colour, rather than areas fenced by a line. Most children meet at least one linear medium —pencil—so long before they have a chance to work in paint, that many keep a preference for working in line, for a very long time. Art lessons in school should always emphasize the use of paint, in spite of difficulties of organization, for children will usually find plenty of opportunities for themselves of drawing with crayon and pencil.

Because pencil is a linear medium, it is not a good idea to let it become a way of starting a painting, not, at any rate, with young children. At a later stage there is sometimes an occasion for it. A painting started with pencil usually becomes either a coloured drawing or the drawing is lost altogether. In these cases, neither paint nor pencil is explored for itself.

None of the linear media has the colour qualities of paint, although work in good-quality pastel can come near it. In general, however, work in paint is needed to develop colour knowledge.

There is, nevertheless, much useful work to be done with these media. They, too, need exploring, so that children can use them with knowledge and understanding.

Let us first consider the particular qualities of each medium.

1. Chalk is a coarse-textured medium, with, as its name implies, a considerable whitening of each colour. All the colours are, of necessity, pale. Fine effects are not possible, but chalk can be used to cover large areas and to work in mass as well as in line. In general coloured paper is a more satisfactory background than white and I usually try to let children have some opportunity to draw in chalk on the blackboard. Chalk smudges very easily and if work is to be kept in good condition, it needs to be fixed with pastel fixative—a job quite easily done with the fixative and blowpipe which can be bought at any art dealers.

2. Pastel is a more refined kind of chalk. Unfortunately, really good pastels are expensive, and the quality of pastel which most schools can afford is nothing like so easy to use or so pleasing in colour. With good-quality pastels, colours can be mixed on the paper as easily as colour can be mixed with paint. In fact, work that can be done with cheap pastels is really quite different from that which can be done with good ones. It is not a bad idea to keep a small quantity of good-quality pastels for any children who show particular interest or promise in this medium. Pastels have many of the characteristics of chalk, but are less white in colour, and much more definition can be achieved. Like chalk, pastel must be fixed if work is to be kept.

3. Crayons. These have a number of useful characteristics. In particular, they smudge less easily than pastel and chalk. The colour comes off on to anything placed on top of the work, however. A fair degree of definition can be obtained, and crayons are often useful in conjunction with pencil, pen and ink, or biro. It should be noted that crayons are made of wax, and just as paint will crawl away from candle-wax, it will also reticulate from crayon. This sometimes makes it difficult to use crayon with pen and ink, but it also means that there are a number of experiments which can be done with paint and crayon.

4. Pencil I almost feel inclined to omit this, since it is the natural tool for drawing for most children, and the majority use the pencil more skilfully than they use other media. I think it is necessary to give a word of warning about "shading", however, because in my experience, top Junior children, having observed the pencil drawings of older people, sometimes become keen to "shade" their drawings with no understanding of the purpose behind this. Shading, in a pen or pencil drawing, can serve two purposes. It can show something of the shape of an object, or it can show texture. We saw earlier that each side of a box was a different colour from the others, because it was in a different plane, and therefore in a different light. Each side is also different in tone, in darkness or lightness. It is this difference in tone which artists are attempting to show when they shade one side of something in a pencil drawing. If the shape is clear without shading, there is probably little point in putting it in. This is, I think, made even clearer in the following example. Draw two lines parallel to each other. These can be anything. They may represent a flat surface or an irregular surface, or they may be the sides of a cylinder. If the ends of the cylinder are in the picture, they will explain the parallel lines, without the need of any shading. If they are out of sight, however, we need to represent the effect of light on the cylinder to explain its shape. One way of doing this is by shading. It can be seen then, that shading is never used merely to decorate the drawing, except by the inexperienced. In general, however, Junior children tend to think and work in two dimensions and are not concerned with representing a third dimension. I would therefore, with all but a very few children, discourage the use of shading for this purpose, the few being those who show a particular interest in the representation of a third dimension.

The use of shading to show form.