Musings: Crayons & A Self-Portrait

So this afternoon I went through and organized my art box. I've decided to purge my art supplies and give some of them to people who will actually use them. I reached my visual arts peak at about age 8, and don't anticipate a major revival anytime soon.  I don't need that much Bristol board under my bed collecting dust.

I found I had 4 boxes of Crayolas in the denominations of 8, 16, 24 and 64. This was just unacceptable. So I organized them all by color. Then I put the 64 best ones (below) for me to keep, and filled up the 16 and 24 boxes with good assortments of colors to give away. For those of you doing the math, at least 8 were broken and thrown away. Yes, I know that they could have been used, or melted into a mega crayon,  but who really wants a broken crayon?

I did learn something interesting while going through all those crayons. Were you aware that red violet and violet red are different? And are apparently both very popular colors? Can you see the difference? You can click the photo for higher resolution and to zoom.

My childhood enthusiasm for a variety of crayons is perhaps the origin of my fascination with color names (see my Denim geography posts: North American, international). It's interesting how different people (especially the professionals at Crayola) chose to describe something in words that is by definition visual.

My carefully assembled box of my 64 best crayons.

I remember at one point having a set with more than 100 colors, so I went online to see what amounts are out there.  I found something amazing: 

This 150-count telescoping crayon tower with storage case and sharpener is a beautiful thing. And it's only $20, $16.75 on Amazon! It's so important to be able to see everything at once (see my jewelry collection). This makes me want to get some new coloring books, that's for sure. 

In actual art, instead of art supply news, I found a self-portrait of mine while going through my pads of paper, entitled " 'Myself': Age 14". I'm glad I had the foresight to date it. I'm going to be 24 this month. Weird.