color my world….

When I was little, I loved coloring!   I reveled in picking my own color palates for characters and scenes in my treasured coloring books.  Blue suns,  pink horses, orange oceans, and green daisies were some of my created anomalies.   I tried to stay inside the lines, but when I didn’t….no worries….it still looked beautiful to me.  It was relaxing and soothing to just sit still with the rhythmic movement of my hand as it went back and forth to fill in the anemic space.  I loved reading the names of the Crayola crayons as I picked them carefully out of my box…periwinkle, burnt sienna, and maize were among my favorites. (I especially loved coloring my Thanksgiving corn with the maize crayon.  I was eternally sad when they retired it.  Boo!)  When I opened the top of a brand new box, I still remember their waxy smell as it came wafting out.  I loved looking at their pointy little caps in nice straight rainbow rows.  I lusted after the biggest box, needing all those varietals, and always implored my Mother to get it for me at the beginning of each school year, promising to use them all.  Life is, after all, about coloring with the whole box.  My crayons gave me a great appreciation for color.

I feel incredibly sad for the new generation of kids that have computer programs to do that for them, to color with a simple click of the mouse.  It’s just not the same.  I feel sad for the the littles in elementary school that have been stripped of this aspect of primal exploration.  They are missing out and losing something very special from being denied the process of this simple act of artistic creation.   Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons. ~Al Hirschfeld.   Chroma is one of God’s most amazing gifts to us with His infinite hues of the flora and fauna of our earthly home.  In a college interior design class, I was taught to look at the way color appears in nature’s combinations and you can’t go wrong.  Coloring is a way of learning about our big beautiful blue planet.

Somebody…YAY for them…. figured out that we needed this simple art form placed back in our lives again.   Adult coloring books are now trending with the Baby Boomers.  They entice us to unplug and return to our childhood roots of play. We still need that time to sit still and know that it is okay to color our world….both inside or outside the lines…it doesn’t really matter. We still need those wonderful crayon color names to dip us into magic waters and remind us of our tender years and the simple pleasures that we so once enjoyed.  And so, I got one some…and they are a Tree Star for me… returned from long ago.

Give crayons.  Adults are disturbingly impoverished of these magical dream sticks. ~Dr. SunWolf