I remember once aggravating a friend by coloring a dog with a periwinkle crayon. It was my favorite color in the box of 64 Crayolas with the built-in sharpener.
You didn't really need the sharpener; you could sharpen your crayons as you colored. It was my mother, the earliest conservationist I knew, who pointed out that the sharpener was there to make you use up your crayons faster so you would have to buy another box sooner.
The gimmick has survived, but nearly half the colors haven't, by my recollection.
A brand-new box of 64 is sitting before me now. I have pulled them all out and separated the ones I remember from the ones that have come along since those days when I lay on the floor coloring with little chums.
Returned to the box, the old colors fill the two back quadrants, and the ones I don't recognize fill the front two. The ones in front look like the colors of gourmet jelly beans, and some bear cute names -- mauvelous, tickle me pink and tumbleweed.
There is no longer a burnt umber, and burnt sienna looks doomed.
In honor of the 100th birthday of the box of 64 Crayola crayons, the Binney & Smith company of Easton, Pa., is retiring four shades to make room for new ones in the new box of 96, and the public is invited to vote out the old and name the new crayons. All the colors are shown on the Web site, http://www.crayola.com/colorcorner /index.cfm.
Burnt sienna is the most somber of the colors up for elimination. The others are blizzard blue, teal blue, mulberry and magic mint. I don't remember the last four, but they are nevertheless old and, possibly, do not become crayon nubbins fast enough.
One hundred years ago, Binney & Smith introduced eight crayons into a society that may or may not have had one notion of what color blue was. This box of crayons took a while to outgrow a shirt pocket. For children of the early '60s, the coloring possibilities exploded. The color once named "flesh" was changed to "peach" in 1962 because it obviously resembled some flesh more than others.
Periwinkle was another way to look at blue. Spring green and sea green were more interesting than green. Magenta was the color most out-there. There wasn't much you could use magenta on in a coloring book of people, trees, cars, grass, dogs and houses, but I remember my playmate Sally trying magenta on a tree trunk. If America was going into space, then why not a magenta tree and a periwinkle dog?
The coloring experience told you a lot about the people you colored with.
Some reached over and scribbled color all over the air on your coloring page.
Some got mad if you colored outside the lines, even though they were your lines. Others got mad if you used anything but brown on a dog.
"Dogs can't be blue."
"It's not blue, it's periwinkle."
"That's not a dog color."
"It is in my coloring book."
"That's stupid."
Then one day an art teacher said, "Try this," and smeared paint where it didn't belong; and one evening, far from home, the sky was pink and orange; and then, by the time I learned to drive, there were chartreuse-colored cars and, when I left home for good, people who were not peach.
Did crayons help me see that a thing was not blue, but teal, not red, but scarlet? Did my experiments in a coloring book help me see the realism in Georgia O'Keeffe's unrealistic mountain colors?
I like to think so. I have known creative adults who thought that giving children coloring books and crayons was merely a way to keep them busy, and that the lines were inhibiting. But I remember that the busy-ness of coloring was blissful, and I learned that the lines could be reordered, just as the colors could be changed. I also know that the sky is periwinkle more often than it is blue and that sometimes, if you really look at a dog, you can see its true colors.
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com and 412-263-1626.
Correction/Clarification: (Published Feb. 8, 2003) Thursday's column by Diana Nelson Jones mistakenly cited the anniversary for which Crayola will introduce four new colors and retire four others. The correct occasion is the 100th anniversary.
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