An old drawing for a new year

A new year is like a fresh box of crayons and a blank sheet of paper.

Illustration Friday: Imagination

Nothing fuels the imagination quite like some blank paper and a box of crayons.

Illustration Friday: Lesson

Sometimes I oversimplify things, but I think that the world just might be a better place if we made sure that all children had a box of crayons.

Don't most kids these days own crayons?  Sadly, the answer is: No.  I substitute teach, and when we're doing the occasional semi-artsy project, I sometimes chat with the kids about what kind of amusements they have at home.  Nintendo and Wii?  Check.  Crayons and paints and pads of plain paper?  Not so much.  I usually end up giving my little speech about the fact that art supplies are really cheap compared to video games.  (You can still buy that glorious box of 64 Crayola crayons for under $5.)

Lest you think me a Luddite, I confess that I have nothing against computer games and video games.  (I remember my laundry backing up as I worked my way through Myst some years back, and my iPad is all smudgy from playing Cut the Rope.)  But kids need art supplies of their very own at home.  They need their own box of crayons, so that they can arrange the colors any way that they want to, peel the paper off, or even break one or two without anyone caring.  Today's teachers, God bless 'em, have to cover such a specific curriculum that there just isn't much time left for a lot of artistic freedom and creativity.  (I remember being asked, by my child's teacher, to outline in Black Sharpie all of the kids' illustrations in their Young Authors books.  I not-so-politely declined.)

"The arts give our young people the power to bring their own voice to the conversation about who they are and how they think."  So says illustrator and artist Betsy Streeter, who has a wonderful website called Drooly Dog. Its mission is "to help young people and their grownups develop their unique voice through art." Check it out.

Maybe giving kids a box of crayons and a big, fat pad of paper won't solve all of our problems.  But on a day when we're finding out that we have one less villain in the world, I keep wondering whether, when he was a child, anyone gave him a box of crayons of his very own.

This week's drawing was inspired by one of my favorite children's books, The Art Lesson by Tomie dePaola. In this autobiographical story, Tomie tells of  the impact that a box of crayons and an open-minded art teacher had on his life.(You might remember that I told you last December about my own love affair with Crayola crayons.) This is such a wonderful book!

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...