Those Crayola colors and the 50s childhood
The other day I came across this chronology of Crayola crayon colors. Although I must confess that Crayolas were something I hadn’t thought of in decades, it all came back in a rush.
First there was the initial pack for the toddler, those big fat crayons with an exceedingly limited palette. Their lack of pointiness made it extra-challenging to color and keep within the lines, not to mention the difficulty of finding a suitable tint for filling in faces and other skin:
Ah but then, finally, after various transitional packages, I graduated to the wonder of the 64-pack, the one with the sharpener in the back:
They were skinny and suitably pointy. But best of all was the variety of the beautiful colors. There was one called “flesh” that eased, without totally solving, the problem of filling in skin (the hue is still there, but renamed “peach” in 1962, for obvious politically correct reasons).
Some of these crayons—the least favored ones—seemed to last forever. But the most attractive and/or most useful got broken and worn down to nubs very quickly. It was a sad day when a favorite got so small it could no longer be sharpened.
Of the ones I loved (and “loved” is really the correct word), the top of the heap were the deep rich tones of “Burnt Sienna” and “Prussian Blue.” The latter has, for some inexplicable reason, been renamed “Midnight Blue” (hard to believe it’s a reaction to storms of protest by storm troops of angry Prussians, but who knows?)
“Burnt Sienna” seems to have survived, as have the red-brown roofs of the town that gave it its name. But I hestitate to offer any attempt at showing you this or any other Crayola color online. All the sites I checked were every bit as inadequate as this one, which purports to offer the proper shades but is so far off as to be worse than useless.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance Crayolas had in the life of the child of the 50s. Looking back, I recall that we (at least we girls) colored almost incessantly—that is, when we weren’t busy with our other major concerns, which were: jacks, jumprope, card games (Canasta and War, primarily) and hopscotch, listed in no particular order. Television was a distant fifth, although good for the times when we couldn’t scare up partners for our usual pursuits, which tended to be done in groups.
One would think that coloring with Crayolas would be a mostly solitary activity. But if one would think that, one would be wrong. We crayoned in groups, too, in a sort of parallel play—or at least in pairs. We used the supposedly creativity-draining coloring books. We drew our own pictures freehand. We made paper dolls and then we designed fanciful clothes for them, and colored them all with our trusty Crayolas.
We often faced the knotty choices of the Crayola aficionado: press down hard and make the color dark and true, and risk fatigue of the hand and arm, not to mention boredom? Or take the easy way out, and use less force? And, if the latter, was it better to fill in the page completely or would a few strokes do, in a sort of impressionist (or perhaps expressionist?) minimalism?
[NOTE: I am sorry that I missed the 50th birthday of the 64-pack last April. Or perhaps it’s just as well, since the ever-moving-forward Crayola folks celebrated by issuing eight new colors with the following sappy and non-descriptive names, reflective of the sentiments (and failings, in my humble opinion) of the present generation: Super Happy, Fun in the Sun, Giving Tree, Bear Hug, Awesome, Happy Ever After, Famous, and Best Friends.
You may be pleased to note, however, that Crayola has addressed and more or less solved the knotty political problem of skin color. The following photo is not a joke, nor is it photoshopped:
It offers a nice sampler of eight shades suitable for coloring the peoples of the world: White, Apricot, Peach, Mahogany, Tan, Burnt Sienna, Sepia and Black.]
That’s pretty cool! Flesh tones were always the hardest to make.
Those big fat crayons and big fat pencils for little kids are the worst thing ever, though. I gave my kids fine point felt pens and colored pencils, and you would be amazed the details that emerged. They never really went for the crayons.
I wonder how many kids will feel pressured to use that literally white crayon in the multi-culti box to color members of the “White Community”?
Fun post! It looks like you aren’t alone in favoring Prussian — now Midnight — Blue.
On January 31, 2001, the results of Binney & Smith’s first on-line poll of consumer’s favorite Crayola crayon colors were revealed. 25,000 votes were cast by Crayola crayon fans of all ages; final tally revealed that America’s favorite Crayola crayon color is blue. Six other shades of blue finished in the Top 10 including cerulean, midnight blue, aquamarine, periwinkle, denim and blizzard blue.
Keep on colorin’!
I love Cerulean and Periwinkle.
I also love to color with Crayola’s with my small relatives. When my Mom was recovering from a brain injury, one thing she could do – and we did together – was color with Crayons. Two adults, coloring away. It was great.
For some reason I made a discipline out of pressing just hard enough to get an even wash of color: not so hard as to make it dense, not so light as to let too much page show through. It took forever to get this right and involved much crayon breakage. Later on, studying art, I wondered if the control those Crayolas taught my hand helped me learn to draw.
Recently somebody gave me a 64-pack of Crayolas and a newsprint pad as a birthday gift. Heaven! But the color names were all wrong. Way back when, my favorite color was red violet.
I remember one Christmas when I got the 64 box and my younger sister got the 32 box. Boy, was she pissed.
Maybe Prussian blue had a name change because real Prussian blue pigment is a complexed cyanide, Fe4[Fe(CN)6]3.xH2O.
Multicultural crayons — it’s a marketable commodity; not unlike anti-paraphernalia [i]damned corporate assholes. [/i]
I recently found a box that said “More of your favorites”. This is particularly true. My little girl is always overusing pinks and runs out of them even though all the rest of the colors are still there. Then you need to go and get another box just so she can have the pinks. Now everywhere you look there are these unused and mostly unusable crayons. They should really come up with crayons for girls with more pinks and purples and crayons for boys with more bright colors.
I am maybe ten years younger (around there) but I got a pack of crayons for my birthday every year. It was anxiously looked forward to and the first picture drawn with the new crayons acquired enormous significance, so that I would plan it for months in advance.
It is perhaps a mark of how much wealthier we’ve all become — and unthinking about our wealth — that my kids got coloring materials whenever they asked for them and invested them with far less significance, even though both of them love drawing and coloring. The $15 or however much it was (it’s been a while) for the large box of crayolas or — as they got older — coloring pencils, just didn’t seem like that big a drain on top of weekly groceries to merit much thinking, so they just got it like… a regular supply. It wasn’t a treat.
And now you’ve reminded me of HOURS drawing paper dolls and clothes and making up elaborate stories about them, sometimes complete with plans for the houses they would live in and drawings of shows/plays/parties they would attend. I could easily spend a month or two lost in each one of these dreams, with one set of characters, before I moved on to the next one. (Usually after I solved all their problems. Very Mary Sue.)
I want to be ten again.
P.
And on second thought, you know what it’s wrong with the “multicultural” crayons? Culture isn’t race and I’m tired of the two getting confused. Culture doesn’t have a color. Equating culture with race is an attempt to get us to stop criticizing poisonous cultures because that’s “racist”.
BS. All races can be in bad cultures. There definitely are cultures that are “better” than others, when understood as promiting human happiness and prosperity. And we should stop the semantic confusion NOW.
P.
The irony of ironies…
The man who mixed Crayolas was color-blind.
Right up there with a deaf Beethoven.
Thanks, Neo. Nice to read something else besides All-things-Obama.
Funny though it may be, those multicultural ones were really useful getting me through 3rd and 4th grades. And the “built-in sharpener” never worked on my 64 pack.
Portia Says:
January 24th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Great comment.
Thanks, Rickl — horribly spelled, though. Possibly because I was running out the door as I typed that. Must remember not to blast off half cocked. 🙂
Political correctness–the children suffer.
As far as being a poison … well, actually it’s used to treat heavy metal poisoning. It binds the metals in the intestine so they don’t keep getting reabsorbed when the liver tries to dump them out in the bile.
I remember cornflower blue. And yes, red violet, blue violet and violet.
And the school projects with shaved crayon bits, wax paper and an iron.
Thank you Portia, for providing an easy target. Heh, heh, heh.
OK. If you want multicultural, step right up, Por, and name the Crayolas. Which one goes first? TechDweeb gray? BitterClingerOrange? How’s bout pretentious BS hippie purple?
I vaguely recall being frustrated with crayons because my older sisters colorings were so damn perfect. She’d kick my ass if i colored in one of her books. Now i can draw and she can’t. Go figure.
“”OK. If you want multicultural, step right up, Por, and name the Crayolas. Which one goes first? TechDweeb gray? BitterClingerOrange? How’s bout pretentious BS hippie purple?””
How about a box in 64 shades of socialist grey?
Take a box of colors and call it multicultural. That’s the sort of stuff you get when you have to label everything and the label has to be more correct than descriptive and the result is just silly.
Take American Indian. OK, Columbus didn’t have GPS and thought he smelled samosas. But what’s the alternative now? Native American? A native American is anybody who was born in the Americas. Like me, Mr. Heinz 57.
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The “multicultural” label bothers me too. Race and culture are not interchangeable. Just call them various flesh tones.
I remember the “flesh” color crayon but I was only four in 1962. Maybe when I was six or seven I was using an old box. Even then I thought the label misleading and imprecise. Flesh stopped being one general hue to me by then for certain.
Also, I wonder if they renamed “prussian blue” because that’s the name of a little-known white nationalist musical act.
“”Culture isn’t race and I’m tired of the two getting confused.
Portia””
And isn’t this what “racial” issues in this world really are….Cultural issues? Yet somehow we’re supposed to not be critical of cultures based on the ethnicity of its majority of participants.
Its clear who are the people who can’t get past ethnicity and race. Its also clear who finds inferiority in differing races to the point of offering them a pass on destructive cultural practices.
Culture = color. Interesting.
Wow–what a blast from the past! Thanks, Neo. 🙂
Funny thing about coloring books being a social activity, isn’t it? And not just girls–I remember when my kids were pre-schoolers/primary graders that both the boys and girls would color side-by-side with running commentaries.
BTW, a popular technique from my childhood was to outline the picture with a dark color line, then use a lighter “wash” to fill in the empty space. Was this just an oddity from my neighborhood?
March Hare: No, not just your neighborhood. It was an honored and time-tested technique.