Welcome to Aesthetic Solutions! The primary goals of this blog are to discuss technological solutions that can better peoples' lives as well as the aesthetics that artists use to address a problem.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Crayons!!!!!!

Everyone has used crayons at least once in his or her school career.  Crayons are usually used in elementary school because, according to The Bluest Eye, a person's childhood is not complete without  the fundamental "paints and crayons" (Morrison 110).  High schools dislike crayons because they view crayons as "not nice to look at" (Wallace).   To explain, they believe that crayons are a worthless disbursement.  Actually, high schools should invest in crayons for its vast educational capabilities.
Crayons are a great tool to teach chemistry *1.  For instance, teachers can melt a crayon to demonstrate a physical change *2.  In addition, students can do labs with crayons to test the variety of ways crayons can be transformed *3.  Advanced chemistry classes can even mix Paraffin wax, Beeswax, and Stearic acid *4 to learn how to create crayons.

Melted crayons
Crayons are an even greater asset for teaching art classes.  Personally, I had taken a college art course this fall called Color.  The class' purpose is to present how to mix primary colors *5 to produce secondary and tertiary colors *6 and to reveal the difference between cool colors and warm colors *7.  Teaching these skills to students in high school develops their skills in becoming more proficient and more experienced artists *8. 

Color Wheel




Footnotes:

*1- Fun Fact!  Did you know that QueInteresante, a seller on Etsy.com, offers a 120 set of crayons that has its individual chemical formula on the label? 
*2- Use a hair dryer to melt crayons.
*3- Melt crayons into coconut oil to create 'Crayola lipstick'.
*4- The Stearic acid chemical formula is CH3(CH2)16COOH.
*5- Primary colors are the three basic colors on the color wheel - they are red, yellow, and blue - that create all other colors.
*6- Secondary colors are the colors made from the primary colors. These are orange, green, and violet.  Mix primary colors and secondary colors that are next to each other on the color wheel to create tertiary colors.  There are six tertiary colors:  red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet. 
*7- All colors result from mixing only cool colors, only warm colors, or both cool and warm colors.  This concept also applies to the primary colors.  In other words, there is a warm red and a cool red, a warm yellow and a cool yellow, and a warm blue and a cool blue.  Mixing warm red and cool red make primary red, or Crayola red (In the college course that I took, any primary color that results from its warm and cool color mixture is called a Crayola color :) ) , mixing warm yellow and cool yellow create Crayola yellow, and mixing warm blue and cool blue produces Crayola blue.
*8- Fun Fact!  Did you know that Crayola created the word purple, and that purple is not an actual color?  The proper term for the mixture of red and blue is violet.  

1 comment:

  1. Nice post! I really liked all the footnotes you used and how you used a personal experience. I think you adapted David Foster Wallace's style really well! Also, I never realized that crayons can be used for scientific purposes.

    ReplyDelete