People of Preston: Meet The Girl with the Yellow Crayons

She colours only with yellow crayons, a colour that reflects everything happy and bright and parallels her quiet but enthusiastic character. Supposedly there’s no real reason behind her yellow fascination, she simply “loves yellow, because the sun’s yellow and school busses are yellow” said Mr. Wakits a developmental education teacher at Preston High School. When looking at her artwork, a school bus and a sun will be found on every page. She uses these familiar objects as foundations, she colours them yellow first, and then builds her work from there, adding new shapes and figures and dousing the piece with splashes of other colours to make it better resemble reality.

Being the yellow fanatic that she is, she obviously goes through a lot of crayons explains Mr. Wakits, “We kept on trying to find yellow crayons. We’d buy a pack of crayons, and she’d use the yellow in a day: one yellow, and then we had to buy another pack. We had thousands of crayons.” So, a couple of hundred yellow crayons later, Mr. Wakits decided to seek help, “I called Crayola, and I put in a request just for yellows. We got over two hundred crayons, all yellow.” They also sent yellow crayons to her group home where she visits after school so she can continue her artwork there. While she may go through a record setting amount of yellow crayons, she uses every last bit, putting the tiny end pieces on her finger and then colouring until every last bit is on her paper.

Her love for art is inspiring, “She loves pictures” says Mr. Wakits, “her day is structured so she says, ‘First gym, then lunch, then colouring’”. Art is not only something that grounds her, but it is also a way of expression. She takes speech therapy and she’s very shy but always looks forward to coming to school and doing what she does best,, “when she comes here she can’t wait to go to phys ed. She sits on a yellow scooter, and we pull her around, and she comes back for lunch and right away she gets her green binder, her crayons, her glue sticks, and her extra paper and she colours all lunch hour into the afternoon until she’s done” explained Mr. Wakits. Despite having speech and social impairments, she is said to have a great vocabulary, a creative mind, and a love for singing. Mr. Wakits says that “everyone’s surprised because she doesn’t really talk a lot, but give her a microphone and she’ll sing anything”.

This confidence and fearlessness is also reflected in the development of her artwork over the years, “When I first started” said Mr. Wakits, “she coloured the entire page yellow, but it was only a school bus. Then I started trimming the school bus for her, and we glued it on a piece of paper. Then she started doing the sun, clouds, and trees. Eventually, she would switch colours which was ideal because not everything is yellow” Today she has expanded her rainbow to multiple colours explains Mr. Wakits, “Like a monkey is brown so she’ll look for that colour; butterflies are a different colour” He later explains her progress by saying, “It took a while to switch from yellow to other colours. The blue clouds really got her. Because we couldn’t do yellow clouds, we had to do the yellow sun. But now she calls out the colours as she needs them; ‘yellow sun, blue clouds, green tree, pink flowers’”. After she’s done colouring, her teachers will cut out all of her pictures and she’ll paste them onto a separate piece of paper to make a picture, and by the end of the day she’ll have about six pages of artwork to take home.

A tangible product from a safe and caring place that lets her express her beautiful self in colour.

#POP