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| Melted Crayon Art by Nancy and Sarah |
Recent graduates have one thing in common. At one
time, and not so many years ago, they knew that magic lives in a box of
Crayons. It doesn’t matter if one is eight or eighty; the tinted wax
sticks bring smiles, brightness and color to the world. Last week my
granddaughter, a recent kindergarten graduate, and I carefully picked our
favorite crayons to color a flower and a sky. Suddenly I remember the magic.
I realize how much the Crayons I have used from my
earliest memories have painted my life, my thinking processes and who I am
today. Modern writers have described how colors can impact self-image and
direction in life. Musician and author Shel Silverstein’s verse “Colors,”
goes like this. “My skin is kind of sort of brownish
pinkish yellowish
white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, But I'm told they look orange
in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown,
But it's silver when it's
wet.
And all the colors I am inside
have not been invented yet.
Louis L’Amour stated, “All education is self-education. A teacher is only
a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give
you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child's
coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself."
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The kindegarten graduate
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Underway, I create colors to help describe the nuancs of ever-changing vistas. Imagine plows through the surf and I invent Sea Foam White. In my mind the color is a bubbly kind of white with tones of grey and green that ever so subtly give body to the color. Sometimes when the sun shines bright, the ocean appears almost purple, not quite the Violet Blue once found in a box of crayons, but more of a Dark Royal Purple Blue. I’ve yet to find the perfect color for the beautiful clear blue waters of the Bahamas. Perhaps Crayola could create a Bahamas Blue that would fit somewhere between Aquamarine, Jungle Green and Pacific Blue.
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Bahamas Blue
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The magical world of Crayons began when cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith founded a company to produce pigments for industrial use in New York City during 1885. Early products used red iron oxide for barn paint and carbon black chemicals to make car tires black. According to Wikipedia, the inexpensive black colorants earned the young company a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Slate school pencils were added to the line later that year and soon after experiments with slate waste, cement and talc led to the first dustless white chalk, earning the company another gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
The first boxes of Crayons made a debut in 1903 with an eight-color pack. Over time the variety of colors increased, reaching a high of 120 shades 95 years later in 1998. Since that time, Wikipedia states that while new colors have been added, the new hues always replace existing colors. Since 1958, 13 colors have been retired, (making a total of 133 colors over time) while others have been renamed. Crayola retired Blue Gray, Lemon Yellow, Orange Red, Orange Yellow, Violet Blue, Maize, Green Blue, Raw Umber, Thistle, Blizzard Blue, Mulberry, Teal Blue and Magic Mint. Blue Gray and Orange Yellow were two of my favorites. As social awareness and sensitivity to cultural issues rose to the forefront, Crayola renamed several of their colors.
In 1962, Flesh became Peach for obvious reasons. Mentalfloss.com suggests that perhaps the Civil Rights movement may have influenced that move. Indian Red created in 1958 to help fill the new 64-count box was changed to Chestnut in 1999. At the time the company warned children not to warm “this Chestnut over a fire,” as crayons melt at 105 degrees. Earlier Prussian Blue became Midnight to avoid political associations. Perhaps it was these changes that Robert Fulghum, author of “All I Really Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten, thought of when he wrote, “We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box.”
