Paint and Crayons (or, Color, Color, EVERYWHERE)

The other day, while I was painting my art studio at 2:00 am (as you do), I was thinking about how I wished I were one of those "master edger" types of people. You know, the kind who doesn't need a lick of blue tape to do a clean and pristine paint job; they just delicately drag their paint brush near the woodwork and voila! Perfect edges. No tape.

I kind of hate them.

Master edging is not in the cards for me and I well know it. That's why when I prep a room for painting, there is a great deal of blue tape involved. Perhaps more blue tape than you've ever seen, and in all varieties. I have blue tape in a special dispenser that allows me to easily drag it along woodwork. I have blue tape with 24 inches of plastic drop cloth attached, for the baseboards. I have 2-inch wide blue tape for special circumstances, like doing those Ralph Lauren roller finishes. I even have "delicate surface" blue tape for times when the regular stuff might be just a bit too rough. Lots and lots of bright blue painter's tape.

The prep work required to put all this blue tape in place makes me a little impatient, but this weekend, I reflected on how this is probably something that will always be necessary if Alix and a paint can will be in the same room together. This is not because I'm incapable of learning how to do precise edging (I mean, there must be a trick to it beyond "stop being such a spaz!") but in the end, I actually don't want to bother.

Honestly, very little seems to have changed since I was five. If you look at any of my "art" from childhood, you'll be amazed at the color coverage. That's because I leaned over every coloring project with my crayon gripped tightly in my hot little hand, scrubbing it against the paper with all the intensity I could muster. Back then, there was no hesitation in art-making for me; I committed.

But while there wasn't much hesitation, there were plenty of flattened ends to my crayons and it wasn't uncommon for them to snap under my unrelenting pressure. I wasn't fabulous at staying within the lines, either. I believed that laying on the spring green thick enough so that you could not see the white paper beneath it was far more important than keeping the grass out of the sky. After all, who cares if the lawn drifts into the clouds, as long as it is vibrant?

Well, my brother cared. That's because he was forced to color with me. At three years my elder, he was, what, six million years ahead of me developmentally? But mom made him play with his little sister, nonetheless. So, he sat very patiently and colored with his freak-a-zoid sister. He carefully sharpened crayons and neatly colored orderly pictures so that everything stayed within the lines, creating perfect, evenly-shaded images. Meanwhile, I dug my crayons into the paper, coating everything with a thick layer of black and violet, breaking the crayons and holding them in my fingers all wrong.

Perhaps he wouldn't have cared if it weren't for the fact that we had to share the same crayons. He didn't want to use misshapen, broken crayons that always needed sharpening. So, as the eldest, he laid down the law. Given my reckless behavior, I was banned from using the coveted gold crayon.

He explained that this crayon was valuable because they had to use a little bit of real gold to make it. Otherwise, it wouldn't look gold (anyone with half a brain would know that). Given the crayon's obvious value, you had to be responsible and neat to use it. Only he had demonstrated the necessary self-control.

(My brother told me many things, including that there was a bridge from California to Hawaii, with gas stations along the way. It was a simple lie told to a five-year old little sister in Illinois. However, we didn't stay in Illinois; we moved to California. You see it coming, don't you? When I was 11, my Dad announced that we were taking our family vacation in Hawaii. I, of course, asked if we were going to drive. Thanks, Scott; I'll never live that down. But back to the crayons.)

So he got to use the gold crayon (and the silver and copper ones, too) and I didn't. That hurt, because I loved everything shiny and glittery. But his reasoning seemed iron-clad (or gold-plated) and I couldn't think up an argument. I was left with the choice to correct my wayward coloring ways or abandoned the metallic crayons. Predictably, I stopped using gold.

Fast forward to adulthood and I'm still being a spaz with color, going for coverage and intensity over precision and care. Very little has changed in my personal style except that I now have the tools to compensate for it. I've mastered the many uses of blue tape, masking fluid, and plastic wrap. As a result, whether I'm painting a 15-foot wall, a one-inch scale dollhouse miniature, or a page in an art journal, no one need ever know how tightly I clutched that brush or what else got painted in the process.

And as far as gold crayons go...well, I don't think it is a coincidence that I painted all four walls of my bedroom with metallic paint. That's because in the last 30-some years, I've learned something very important. Staying within the lines and being responsible are two completely different things. And I get to use whatever crayon I want.

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