 You're familiar with 'paint-by-number' sets that allow young beginning artists to make a complete painting by filling in the numbers. Many people become interested in art through kits like these. We found a great program that lets you take a digital photo of someone and transfer it into a set of instructions to produce a 'Crayon-by-Number' portrait. Just as with the old paint-by-number kits, students can learn a lot about how different colours blend together, especially at a distance, to produce an image that is more than the sum of its parts. In this case, you can do it with your students' own faces! Here are a few of the results obtained by using the program: 
 After you install the program (which works on Windows 98 through XP), you take a digital image of someone's face, and transfer it to your computer. Using the Crayon-by-Number program, you load the image, and transform it into a picture with fewer colours. You then print out a set of instructions, and two line drawings of the image. One is full of numbers, which match the colours in a Crayola box of crayons. The other is the one that gets coloured. You have a choice of which size box of crayons to use, from 16 colours through 96. We chose the Crayola 96 crayon box, to get a more life-like image. Students find all the areas on the first sheet numbered '4', for example, and according to the legend provided, colour all those areas with the corresponding colour. 
The program allows you to adjust the brightness, contrast, and degree of detail, and some experimenting is needed with each picture. As you can see from the samples, indoor lighting, shadowed skin tones, and only 96 colours can lead to some rather interesting combinations of colours on the portraits. Some students (we tried this with a grade 5/6 class) were disconcerted at first that large parts of their faces were being coloured in various unlikely shades of green! However, when they were done, almost every portrait strongly resembled the owner, especially from a distance. If you view the samples on this page from across the room, you will see that the colours blend together to make quite respectable images, which do indeed look like the students portrayed. This of course is the essence of colour mixing and matching when painting with oils or watercolours. The only problem we had was that it took a long time to complete the portraits. We allowed about twelve 30-minute classes, and some students didn't finish. 
The program might also be used as a fund-raiser. You could easily take pictures of people and sell them the sheets (and crayons) for a small profit; the entire process only takes a few minutes. Being able to produce a nice portrait of yourself with crayons is quite impressive.You could also easily use the program to produce crayon images of scenery; it might be a worthwhile project to examine all the different shades of green that are needed to create a life-like image of a tree. Students could then go on to making their own images without the benefit of the program. If you think you might want to try out the program, you can find out more about it at www.crayonbynumber.com. It must be ordered on CD (delivery takes a few weeks), but it can be ordered and paid for through the website. The price was very reasonable. 
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