How I Won The Crayon War

Thought I'd better explain the header on this blog.

For those of you to which numbers have a great deal of meaning and happen to know my age, the label at the top of the blog might have you a bit confused. 1987 doesn't seem to be a significant year in my life.

The answer is to be found in just how many years after my birthday on the first of July 1982 the September of 1987 had me.

Five.

I was five and it was school that became a part of my life that year like a relative moving into your attic with no plans to vacate the premises for a good long while.

You see, my mother was an artist and so i guess it never occurred to her to correct us in our artistic endeavors at home because art is art and children are apt to do whatever they like including coloring outside lines.

But when school became a welcome guest in my life, it soon became unwelcomed and loathsome because of the idea in my teachers' heads that there is a right and wrong to crayons.

Now I'm an adult I can see that crayons have very little application in grown up society and if any of the A grade receiving children of days past moved on to jobs coloring maps in map shops because of the precision with which they first outlined each country, then filled in the body while keeping painstakingly within the lines, I'll swim to Bangladesh with the next herd of reindeer going that way.

Not that keeping within lines ever concerned me. I didn't much care how teachers "liked" or didn't like my work. My first memory of really being frustrated with teachers using art as a vehicle for societal conformity happened because it was a requirement for leaving the classroom at the end of the day.

My kindergarten single-wide trailer sat in a swamp in South Carolina. My teacher, Ms. Bailey, decided this particular day to reinforce the idea that we were prisoners she ought to make it harder to leave. Our assignment was to color a self portrait and bring it to her to be ridiculed before returning home for afternoon cartoons. I felt confident I could do this and so soon had my paper in hand, my bag on my back, and myself in the line forming to head out to freedom.

She stopped me when she saw the hair.

In my childhood I had very light blonde hair. Being light blonde and five I assumed in my ignorance that a white crayon might work since other children sometimes called my hair white.

I had eight crayons. It didn't take long to see I was deficient in "light blonde."

She frowned at me and explained why I was confused and that "your hair isn't white Benjamin."

I turned back to the table. Only the five or six really mentally retarded kids in my class remained.

I tried to erase the white and found out that doesn't do anything but smear the white with a lot of black from the outline.

Yellow.

Add yellow to white and you should get blonde. Right? It was worth a try. But the yellow just sort of smeared over the top. It looked really crappy.

She looked angry this time. I wasn't sure what she expected me to do, but this obviously wasn't it.

"Your hair is not yellow Benjamin." You may start to understand why I go by Ben.

This went on for about a half hour.

Me being told what color my hair wasn't, going back, and continuing to see how inadequately equipped my stupid kindergarten crayons were at recreating realistic lifelike colors.

I think the paper finally ripped as I tried unsuccessfully to mix brown and gold into the mess my head had become. Ms. Bailey, its a wonder the kind soul never married, finally let me go home because the afternoon kids were filing in and an eight year old returning for his third try wanted the seat I was in.

Another pleasant experience in coloring came what seemed like years later because we moved to Florida in between, but was really just the next year in first grade.

We were in my math class.

I guess I should elaborate. For some strange reason the entire school besides the office and the library consisted of trailers connected by covered walkways patrolled constantly by power hungry fifth graders in orange road construction vests. Many of them I believe are  still wearing one.

It was this math class where for a number of weeks our time was spent numbering graph paper. We sat busily filling in each square of graph paper with numbers. I think the teacher called this "counting exercize".

I apologize for the lack of detail on the teacher but I had seven. I think my goal in school at this point was filling my folder as thick as I could before the end of the year. This was accomplished by never turning anything in. Every paper I got whether homework assignment, permission slip, or note to my parents about my lack of drive was added to the two inch thick collection I proudly carried with me.

I also remember spending much of my class time pushing my eyelids from the sides to make the room go sideways so the teacher seemed to stand on the wall. It was a productive year.

Counting exercizes lost their intrigue when I reached a hundred and realized the numbers just started over again like the double digits. There were no new numbers. 
1-9 was all there ever would be. This really disappointed me. I remember thinking adults were a lot dumber than I'd imagined if the only things really  separating us were this and height .

Some of the more eager students at my table got all the way into the four and five hundreds.

One day, as a result of a parent teacher conference or threats of firing my math teacher gave us something else to do.

Worksheets.

All I noticed was the picture of the turtle smiling back at me. I heard the word crayons and so put two and two together- MATH- and got mine out to begin coloring. Here was an assignment I could sink my teeth into. As the other children at my table began solving the addition problems at the top of the page to unlock which colors went with which number in the picture, I gathered up every ounce of observable reference material in my head and began.

My brother had two turtles at home. I was familiar with the complexity of colors making up the shell and skin of the North American Terrapin. I pulled out a brown crayon and started on the rim of the shell. Whoever drew this hadn't looked at real turtles much. It was way too curvy and I'd never seen a real turtle smile.

Gasps of horror suddenly exploded from the ignoramuses I was forced to share table space with. "What are you doing?"

"You're not even in the lines!"

"I'm telling!"

A hand shot up followed by the other arm rested horizontally across the head to help hold up the signal arm. She would wait however long it took to ensure my demise.

I'm not sure if the teacher ever got around to helping my dismayed table-mate or not. I guess if counting was really considered challenging, then addition was bound to stump a few in the audience. I apologize for the lack of detail here but I honestly don't recall any response to my work.

I was proud of what I'd accomplished with some white and yellow here, and some greens, browns, and oranges there. It really resembled Tom. That was my brother's turtle, the browner of the two. I was really pleased with my work and who cared what a bunch of kids with boring green turtles thought of it. I was sure my teacher would appreciate my creativity if she'd seen it, but of course, if she didn't come over to answer the raised hand, then she missed her chance.

Like everything else, It went in my folder.

Hence the blog undertitle, Coloring outside the lines since 87.

Its kind of funny. From my failed experiences coloring as a child, you'd think I'd never qualify for a coloring job. But I did.

I'm a colorist.

That means I'm in charge of the color balance, saturation, and contrast of footage in the TV shows, commercials, and movies I work on.

So I guess if you or someone you know is struggling with school, I'm a bad example. But I'm happy because its much better than filling graph paper with numbers for a living.

Brooksby Color Demo Reel from Ben Brooksby on Vimeo.