There is no evidence of the preliminary tentative mark, of the initial hesitant touch of the pencil or crayon that would allow the artist to get his bearings and select the position for the first expressive line.
Red beads about her neck, her twisted hair secured with a scarlet crayon.
But his life off the pitch whispered "nice cup of tea" in children's crayon.
And the line is drawn with real pressure – whether crayon, pencil or charcoal – hard, dark and jagged.
"Tie", cut out of paper, has four eyes drawn in crayon descending from its faux knot to its point.
But it is the gritty crayon strokes that captured my attention, as if they were some illegible script, or alphabet.
It was students camped in his LSE office; it was cross-bench voting in the House of Lords, to which he was appointed in 1993; it was his father's passionate underlinings, in red crayon, in Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation"; it was a schoolboy ripping up his prison mattress in order to write down, defiantly, all the Latin he knew.
This gouache and crayon work on paper is $4m.
Contemporary paintings tend to be large, but Mr Alÿs's works in oil, encaustic and crayon on wood are often no more than six inches wide.
In Klimt, tenderness of line is at its most exquisite in a series of drawings in pencil and coloured crayon that are seldom shown because of their sensitivity to light.
He applied his crayon to lithographic stone and created thousands of other works of satire, targeting lawyers, policemen, faddish artists and other scoundrels.
