‘Bean Chalk’ Conjures Up New Ways To Draw With Colors That Sprout
Image via Areaware
In Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack is sold unassuming beans that grow to reach into the clouds. These “beans” from Areaware aren’t of the same species, but they’re here to help dream up giants in a unique way.
Bean Chalk, available in a crop of 12 vibrant tones, isn’t your ordinary drawing tool. These chalk pieces are as quirky as they are functional. With their curly and interlocking shape, resembling beans or even cashews, they allow you to double up on colors, drawing with two hues simultaneously.
If you’re not that hungry on color, splitting the pods up into single beans will do.
Image via Areaware
Artist and designer Nikolas Bentel describes how this beanstalk of an idea was planted.
Chalk, in all its simplicity, has been a timeless medium. For Bentel, however, the goal of Bean Chalk goes beyond novelty. It’s about redefining our collective ties with drawing. He reflects, “As children, before we have the ability to put a coherent sentence together, we are given pencils, crayons, and chalk to draw. Typically these tools are straight with a point. Is it possible the typical straight pieces of chalk and crayon that we are given as little kids have accidentally created a standardized way of thinking about how to draw?”
Image via Areaware
“Whether our tools for drawing are a thin pencil or a block of chalk, the tool will always inform our hand and our creations.”
Well, until now. Bean Chalk colors outside of the lines and challenges users to forget all the straight-cut ways they’ve learned about how a piece of art is made.
Image via Areaware
Bentel elaborates that he initially intended Bean Chalk as a simple bean that “complemented its own shape and could interact with itself.” However, he pondered on how the same shape could introduce different colors and engage with itself “as two parts of a whole, almost as if it is in an embrace.”
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The designer shares that the reimagined piece of chalk straddles between the lines of “surreal and natural.”
Surreal, “because the beans almost look like a computer rendering when they sit on the asphalt,” and natural, because they’re shaped like the ones we eat. Cool beans, indeed!
Bean Chalk is sold in six pairs, giving 12 hues, for US$25 on Areaware.
[via Areaware]
This article was crafted with assistance from an AI engine, and has been manually reviewed & edited.
