When the founder of toy company Kid Made Modern Todd Oldham was a kid, he left a box of crayons in a hot car one summer. When he returned, all the colors had melted together, becoming one giant multi-colored crayon blob.
Now, Oldham has partnered with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to create what he now calls Smush Crayons–giant crayons that are composed of a variety of different colors all melted together. But rather than a random assortment of colors like that crayon box of yore, these Smush Crayons are derived from three masterpieces in MoMA’s collection: Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Monet’s Water Lilies and Alma Thomas’s abstract work Untitled.
Then the question was: How to bind the shavings together? He tried putting a cluster of the shavings in a mold and then leaving it out in the sun. He tried putting them in the oven. He tried using super-high pressure to bind them together. Nothing worked.
To ensure that each crayon’s colors are true to the inspirational artwork, Oldham fed high-resolution scans of the paintings into a digital spectrophotometer, which was able to give him a reading of the most prominent colors in each painting. Then he and his team make decisions about what to include in terms of both color and ratio. “We [had] to go in and try to honor the emotion and sum of parts of the painting,” Oldham says.
For the MoMA collection, the Smush Crayons are all the size of a very large pencil. When you draw with them, you never get the same color twice; instead, the colors bleed into each other beautifully, creating a gradient effect. You can also lay Smush Crayons flat against your paper and rub them that way to create a beautiful watercolor effect.
“It’s the quickest way to really see inside of a painting,” Oldham says. “It’s a very special view.”
The MoMA Smush Crayons are available online and in-store for $6.