Our Childhood Love of Crayons and the Art of Brian Wildsmith
It’s January and I’m hungry for color. Virginia’s winters are gray, damp, and dreary, much like the winters in England. At the grocery store, I buy a $2 bunch of daffodils to conjure the sun inside my kitchen. I gaze at my 120-color box of Crayola crayons that sits next to my set of 96 crayons. Neither box has my all-time favorite, Green Blue, a color retired years ago.
In 1990 my husband bought me a 72 set of Crayolas in a plastic carrying case. It has both Green Blue and Blue Green (and seven other colors retired later that year). He understood my craving for crayons. Open the box and sniff! Crayons smell like possibility. They also smell like time: I am eight years old again and coloring a picture I’ve drawn. There is a constancy about crayons. Crayola may create new colors with sometimes ridiculous names (Macaroni and Cheese, Outer Space) but the size, shape, and paper wrapper remain the same.
During my husband’s last weeks, when winter begrudged spring, I was desperate to give him something beautiful. I turned to a remedy that cured most ills. Picture books couldn’t stall death, but they were all I had. I ordered two books by British illustrator Brian Wildsmith (1930 – 2016) whose unexpected use of color has dazzled children since his first book in 1961.
In Bear’s Adventure (1981), a bear falls asleep in the basket of a hot-air balloon parked in a wildflower meadow. He floats upward then down onto a city street. Wildsmith’s skyscrapers, outlined in medium blue and lipstick pink, could have been rendered by an imaginative child who smudged the scene with strokes of yellow, red, and green. The bear wakes up in the middle of a costume parade, is rushed into a taxi to a studio, and interviewed on television.
Color explodes on every page, from the kaleidoscopic blades of a helicopter (the bear finds himself in surprising places), to backgrounds soaked in oatmeal gray or stark white or pale pink splattered with magenta. It’s as if the child making these pictures grabbed any crayon at hand. Wildsmith used watercolor, colored pencil, and, it seems, whatever else was within easy reach. The result is art that delights the eye, surely created in joyous abandon, combined with the witty story of a blundering bear.
In truth, Wildsmith orchestrated each of his illustrations in his mind before picking up a brush. “I call it the ‘Mozartian Method,’” he said in an interview. “Mozart had the complete sounds in his head before he wrote them down … It’s like that for me. The subject and the intensity of what has to be expressed determine if I use a combination of reds and blues, or if blue or yellow is prominent … There’s a certain intuitive way of doing it.”
Often dubbed the “Magician of Colour,” Wildsmith was raised in Yorkshire, England, a mining town that, in his words, was “grey, there wasn’t any colour.” Unwilling to go into the mines, he drew “airplanes dogfighting and ships shoving each other.” He aimed to be a scientist, yet veered in the direction of creativity, attending the Barnsley School of Art and then, as a fish-out-of-water scholarship student, the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, where he was too poor to buy paints and brushes. Maybe he had Crayola crayons, that inexpensive stand-by art supply.
Cousins Edwin Binney and Harold Smith founded Binney & Smith in 1885, making dustless chalk before they mated paraffin and pigment to produce sticks of color wrapped in paper. Headquartered in Easton, Pennsylvania, Crayola crayons appeared in 1903, in red, blue, green, yellow, orange, violet, brown, and black. Today, the factory manufactures 13 million durable crayons a day — 650 a minute — in 148 colors (some have been retired) that are packed in iconic green and yellow boxes in sets of 8, 16, 24, 48, 64, 96, and 120.
Among my husband’s few school papers is a mimeograph map he colored in red, green, and blue. After 85 years, the colors are as vibrant as the day he opened his box of sturdy crayons.
Humans first developed a color sense to survive. Color was necessary to identify ripe red fruit in a dense green forest. Color allows us to identify objects, aids in memory, and helps decision-making. It also influences mood. Bedroom walls painted blue exude a feeling of serenity (though mine are shrimp pink, popular in the 1940s). Yellow kitchens convey cheerfulness (mine is apple green, the color of my mother’s kitchen cabinets in the 1960s).
After art school, Brian Wildsmith taught art and designed book covers. His children’s book career began when he showed his portfolio of abstract paintings to Mabel George, the children’s book editor at Oxford University Press. He was assigned to create twelve paintings for the 1961 edition of Tales from the Arabian Nights. A critic panned, “We now descend to the lowest depths … these aimless scribbles which… wander aimlessly and pointlessly.” Unfazed, Mabel George realized that OUP had something fresh and new in Brian. She asked him to do an ABC book.
Wildsmith’s 1962 ABC, according to The Guardian in 2006, “has an expressive, tactile quality that children relate to instinctively. The colours shout, sing or whisper, and the brush strokes (even now) have a freedom and spontaneity that make you feel that the paint might still be wet.” Part of its success was George finding an Austrian fine art printer, freeing Wildsmith from the tedious color-separation process that bound most picture book illustrators at the time. The book burst onto the “staid world of children’s publishing” and captured the Kate Greenaway Medal. Children’s picture books in the UK were never the same.
More children’s books poured from Wildsmith’s paint pots. Some criticized his impressionistic illustrations as too vivid, but children, hungry for color, loved them. Wildsmith was especially adept at painting animals, often in unexpected hues. He once said, “Everything is living: animals, birds, bees, people, flowers, and each has its own soul. I try to express that inner soul.” Who’s to say that a rhinoceros’ soul isn’t purple? Wildsmith believed his audience was good at “reading” his illustrations. Words and art, he said, created an exciting experience.
The second Wildsmith book I bought to share with my husband, Animal Gallery (2008), pairs collective nouns of animals with bold, expressive art. I bought the book after seeing the spread “A stare of owls,” and discovered the rest of the book is just as astonishing. A “party of rainbow fish” forms a rainbow-arch across a dark sea background so highly-textured, you want to plunge your hand into that chilly water, believing your wrist will slice its surface. My husband lingered over the deep jungle-green “A lepe of leopards.”
For an hour or so, he explored scenes in every shade imaginable, leaving the black and white confinement of cancer to slink across grassy savannahs, wedge through river reeds, amble over meadowed hillsides, and float skyward in a hot-air balloon with a slumbering bear. I couldn’t ask more of two very necessary picture books.
For this essay, I retrieved my 72 set of crayons tucked in an old dry sink cupboard. When my parents died in 1987 and 1989, and the house I grew up in sold, I decided to revive my childhood dream of becoming a children’s book illustrator. I was 38 and had never taken a single art class. I bought paints and paper and palettes, but my husband surprised me with that wonderful case of crayons, all the colors I would ever need, along with his steadfast support.
I smell those unused crayons — possibility! — and I am eight years old, mind and body engaged in making art. I am also 40, realizing I wasn’t good enough to become an illustrator. And I am 73, crying over the gift of color and missing the giver whose faith in me never wavered. My life at present is mostly gray, but I still bring home stacks of picture books from the library. I need words and color now more than ever. I think maybe we all do.
Sources
“Brian Wildsmith.” Creative Inspiration. Blog. March 11, 2014.
Brian Wildsmith’s website.
Carey, Joanna. “Food for the soul.” The Guardian. May 13, 2006.
Goldstein, Sam. “What’s in a Color? For Humans, a Great Deal.” Psychology Today. May 8, 2025.
Moreillon, Judi. “Brian Wildsmith’s Magical World of Color.” Children and Libraries. Summer/Fall 2008. Access through Course Hero or via Proquest at your local library.
Wildsmith, Brian. Animal Gallery. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Wildsmith, Brian. Bear’s Adventure. Star Bright Books, 1981, 2018.
Witmer, Ann. “The new Crayola Experience of Easton: Not far by car.” Penn Live.com. May 16, 2013.
This is so poignant and personal. Beautifully written. I am so sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing this with us.
A writer friend of mind was stymied by grief and unable to write. She found her way back by beginning to draw with, yes, crayons. Thank you for sharing the colors of hope!