Color holds a lot of power over people. Whether it’s the soft tones of a light pink or a dark color like a carbon black, they can bring about different feelings in all of us. There is no company known better for color than Crayola. These masters of colors in crayon form have been around since 1885 and they have produced a lot of crayons to bring color to our lives. However, over 100 years some colors have fallen in popularity and have been retired from the crayon box to make room for new colors. We look back at these Top 5 Retired Crayola Crayon Colors!
Retired Crayon Colors – Van Dyke Brown
A brown color that was originally made from peat or soil in the past, Van Dyke Brown gave old-world artists an earthy brown color to work with. It is said to be named after the 1600s era artist Anthony Van Dyke. The color can be made and used in both oils and watercolors for painting and Crayola had the color in crayon form until it was retired in 1910. Television artist Bob Ross loved the color in his set of oil paints and used it for earth tones in his paintings on his television show The Joy Of Painting.
Retired Crayon Colors – Venetian Red
Crayola had both a light and a dark version of this red at one point in the crayon box. In renaissance times it was a popular color in paintings and it is said that one of the pigments in the painting version of the color was from Turkey. During the English civil war from 1642 until 1651 the color was used for the uniforms of the New Model Army and this practice was carried on after the war by the British army as a whole. Venetian Red became what people had in mind when using the term “Redcoats” because Venetian Red Dye was cheaper to produce in that era. Both the light and dark Crayons were retired by Crayola in 1910.
Burnt Umber
This color was first named in the English language in 1650. Even then the color had a long history and it is said that this was one of the first pigments used by humans and found in ancient cave paintings painted by cavemen. It is made from iron oxide and manganese oxide amongst others. In its natural form, it is often looked at as a collection of tones from medium to dark including yellow, red, brown, grey, amongst numerous other tones. Like many other colors in Crayola’s collection, ingredients used to make Burnt Umber were hard to come by during World War II and the crayon was retired officially in 1949.
Cobalt Blue
A color that goes back into history and was used by the Chinese as the primary pigment in making the blue in many porcelain pottery objects. It was also used in making art and appears in paintings by such artists as Turner, Renoir, Monet, and Van Gough. It was first named Cobalt Blue around the late 1770s. Although very deep and used by artists and creators for centuries, chemicals to make Cobalt Blue paints were usually very toxic. On the safer side was Crayola use of the color to make a crayon of their own that didn’t have the ill effects of the natural pigments used. They retired the color in 1958 to coincide with the release of a new box to have that featured 64 different colors.
Dandelion
Dandelion was retired in 2017 and was given a bigger send-off then most of the other retired crayons of the past. When the crayon was ended in April of 2017, Crayola actually took the color and the crayon on a small retirement tour through places like New York, Toronto, and several stops through the state of Pennsylvania. There was even a retirement tour special marked box of Crayons to celebrate the special occasion before the color was officially retired and placed into history.
