Coloring

Today I walked to the store to get a coloring book. I found flash cards, activity books, stickers and math exercises, but no coloring books. I wondered what happened to simply choosing your own colors and deciding if you want to color inside or outside of the lines. Observing all of the shades of color in nature, taking a big box of crayons and coloring the different nuances and textures takes observation and creativity. A plain piece of paper works too, but piquing the imagination with a drawing rather than a pre-colored activity book can be loads of fun. It takes imagination for kids to come up with colors adults might find unrealistic. They might be imagining another perspective or a new way of seeing something.

I’ve given workshops on vegetables and color. I hear parents tell children to color the carrot orange when the child chose a different color. Vegetables come in a variety of colors. The vegetable colors we are used to may depend on where we live. In the west people are used to carrots being orange, while in Afghanistan people still eat purple carrots.

As I walked home I noticed all of the shades of green in the trees, grass, and leaves. In the shade the leaves are a very dark green, while in the sunshine the tree branches look Yellow-Green, Lime, and Screamin’ Green. It would take at least the 133 standard Crayola colors to begin to illustrate nature. I came home and found a long list of websites that have free coloring pages to print. I have a big box of Crayolas in the closet. I think I'll try coloring a piece of my walk through the park.

110 minutes walking