Victoria Green Cigar

Our pigment cigars are carefully formed using an old wood cigar press, using a blend of pure pigment, softened with English China Clay, a natural mineral clay from Cornwall.Each cigar measures approximately 4″ x 1″.

The wood press ensures the resultant crayon has a rounded tip, which allows expressive marks to be made freely. The binding is just enough to hold the pure pigment colouring in stick-form, yet the drawn mark is immediate and can be easily smudged and manipulated on the drawing surface with fingers/paper stumps.

Watch artist Sandi Hester use the pigment cigars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oau_6RyB1oU

The Cigar Crayon can also be worked into with water – to create washes. The binding is water resoluble, so drawn marks can be modified as required. You can also work with mix media, for example, introducing watercolour or acrylic colours (in dilution with water) to enhance/change the drawn marks. Suitable for use on all art papers but especially good onto toothy supports. Wallace Seymour Pastel Primer (Pumice Ground) is the ideal liquid primer to use to prepare paper/boards, etc. the dried pastel primer has a gently abrasive surface, which helps catch and hold pigment as the Cigar-Crayon contacts with the support.

The use of such abrasive grounds minimises the need to use fixative to hold the finished artwork.

The Cigars come in an assortment of colours, hand-picked by Jeanne Oliver.

This eclectic mix includes unique colours such as Indigo, a natural plant pigment; natural ochre from Burgundy, France and our own production red ochre from Leighton in Lancashire, England. This old English estate dates back to medieval times – the nearby village of Warton has long associations with George Washington’s family – and the ‘paint mines’ on Warton Crag have been dug for their fine iron ores since the iron age. In the 18 & 19C the Paint Mines on the Leighton Hall Estate were used for colour production, for commercial and artist’s paints. Since the early 20C, the paint mines were abandoned. Our project involved procuring mineral iron ore form the old paint mines and pulverising the raw ore into very fine powder, down to 20-30micron size. This yields a very strong colour when used as a pigment, in watercolour, oil, or in pastel form, as with the Pigment Cigar format.

For other colours, we were inspired by local place names, such as Cattrigg Green (a waterfall in a wooded glade) and Malham Green (Limestone karst) from our region in North West England.

All of the pigment cigars have been custom created for Jeanne Oliver Designs by Wallace Seymour.