Pencil Pushers Take Bethesda

Pencil Pushers Take Bethesda

All summer at the Strathmore Mansion in North Bethesda, you may find gallery-goers huddled around a small, photorealistic depiction of a fruit in a plastic bag. “Hold on,” one of them may whisper, “is that really just colored pencil?”  For colored pencil artists and their champions, this scene is far too common. Though the medium has existed for centuries and high-end colored pencils have been available to artists since 1924, people are still sk…