New crayons

When I was a child, one of my favorite Christmas presents was the brand-new box of 64 Crayola crayons that we'd receive each year. I loved everything about them: the way the box broke open along the perforated top, the smell of them, the feel of them, and those color names...periwinkle, maize, salmon. (One of my most treasured estate sale finds is this mint condition, unopened box from way back when...before they changed some of the original color names. I'm such a crayon geek that I've only opened it from the bottom.)

So, this Christmas, when my family gave me a set of 132 colored pencils (every color Prismacolor makes!), I felt the exact same excitement. I loved opening the lid of the tin, seeing those pencils all lined up inside, and reading their color names (there's no maize but there is a periwinkle and a salmon pink). Prismacolor doesn't package them in color groups, for some reason, so this is how they looked:

(There are other wonderful brands of artists' colored pencils, such as Derwent and Faber-Castell, but I've always been partial to Prismacolor. The color lays down smoothly, they blend well, they're widely available and the whole pencil barrel is colored. I've tried other brands, but when only the top half-inch of the pencil shows you what color it is, I find myself spending way too much time looking for the right color.)

Yesterday, the fun began - sorting, sharpening, and organizing . There's something so satisfying about arranging art supplies by color. I kept thinking back to my freshman year in college: I was studying interior design, and we were required to buy a pack of 500 Pantone colored papers for our design projects. It was no small investment, so we handled our boxes like gold. One night, I decided, along with a couple of fellow design students, to lay out every single one of the papers on the floor of the common room of our dorm forming a huge mosaic of color. We spent hours on it, happily debating how to sort  the colors, etc. Yesterday was a lot like that for me - should aqua go with the greens or the blues? Seashell pink is really more beige than pink, so should it live with the other neutrals? (I'm sure my husband thought I was taking this way too seriously.)

At long last, the three families of greys are in my canvas roll case, and the rest are happily residing in glass jars on my work table. I'm ready to draw. Or, I may just sit here and stare at them for a while longer...