Oh, What a Crayon Can Do! According to the Crayola website (2015), Binney & Smith created the first set of Crayola crayons in 1903. The first box had 8 different colored crayons: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and black. As of 2015, there are over 120 different colors to choose from. You can even customize a 64 count box (Crayola, 2015). Since their creation, crayons have been found their way into art classrooms across the United States and the world. Artists from preschool age to grown adults have used crayons to produce quality artwork. The medium is not just for filling in coloring pages, but can also blend, melt, and enhance paintings. In my research I have found a wide variety of techniques that crayons can be used for. I have found examples of artwork from a range of ages from four to sixty-eight. Perhaps the first thing that very young children learn is something that we often take for granted, namely they learn that they can, in fact, create images with material, and that the activity of making such images can provide intrinsic forms of satisfaction. (Eisner, 1978, p. 6) The simple medium of a crayon can provide children with the opportunity to create artwork from a very young age. With it’s paper covering, inexpensive and easy availability, and washability, even an infant can experience the satisfaction of mark making. The youngest artist in my research collection is 4 years old. Her name is Grae and she lives in Kuwait. Figure 1: Leaf Rubbing Collage by Grae. 2014 Her artwork is of leaf rubbings (Figure 1). She collected leaves with her mother, placed the leaves under her paper, and rubbed the crayon on the paper. The impressions that are left are the veins of the leaf. Eisner’s observation of “intrinsic forms of satisfaction” rings true in a project like this. I have used this activity in my classroom and have seen the satisfaction among my Kindergarten and First Grade classes.
Figure 2: Untitled by Justin. 2015
Justin, a Kindergartener from Savannah, Georgia, used crayons in a Picasso-esque artwork (Figure 2). Along with his classmates, Justin drew a face and torso on a large piece of paper, drew facial features on a separate paper, cut them out and glued them on their original portrait work. Collage is a