Who is Tip, the Crayola mascot?

Crayola Crayons

If you grew up in the United States (like I did), you've almost certainly interacted with Crayola crayons. The brand has a reported 98% name recognition in the USA. As a child, I drew with Crayola crayons, and preferred them to other crayon brands.

In my mind, Crayola is synonymous with good crayons, and the brand is an integral part of childhood.

Tip

A few months ago, my wife left a box of Crayola crayons on our kitchen table. I happened to read the little blurb on the back of the box.

The lore in this blurb is crazy - Crayola's mascot is an ancient spirit that decided to take the form of a Crayola crayon in 1903. I found this so interesting that I decided to learn as much as I could.

Sources and Resources

I immediately went to Google to learn more. The internet was not as helpful as I had hoped. Neither Wikipedia's article on Crayola nor the article on the History of Crayola Crayons mentions Tip.

I looked harder and found a dedicated Crayola Wiki. However, their article on Tip was not very informative. It's just a summary of the back-of-the-box blurb.

The Crayola website was equally unhelpful. I scoured and searched, but I was unable to find any information about Tip.

With no help from the usual suspects, I needed to go deeper. I ended up finding a few resources that could be helpful:

• Antique Crayon Listings: People selling antique Crayola crayons post high-quality pictures of the products online. I could use these pictures to learn about Crayola branding, and how it changed over the years.
• The Internet Archive. This site let me look at the historical Crayola website from 1996 to today. That's a 30-year span!

The History of Crayola

In 1885, Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith founded the Binney & Smith Company, which manufactured chalk and pigments. The company incorporated in 1902. The next year, they began manufacturing wax crayons.

These crayons eventually became the company's main product. In 2007, the company was renamed Crayola, inc.

Crayola's First Mascot

Tip was not the first mascot for Crayola crayons. Crayola crayons were often marketed as the 'Reubens Crayola Line' (in reference to Peter Paul Reubens, a famous Flemish artist). While not a mascot in the typical sense, Reubens was Crayola's first mascot. His picture was printed on each crayon.

Nowadays, branding is very streamlined across a company's products. This was not as much the case a hundred years ago. In the first decade of Crayola production, Binney and Smith experimented with several different ways of branding their crayons.

In 1904, Binney and Smith won a medal for chalk. As a result, Crayola crayon branding began to include a medal emblem. The Reubens and Gold Medal branding coexisted for nearly 50 years.

Reubens was dropped in the '50s, and Crayola was largely mascot-less until Tip appeared. But when was that?

Finding Tip's First Appearance

I needed to track down the first time Tip appeared in Crayola materials or packaging. To find out when Tip showed up, I looked at a lot of 'vintage Crayola' sales online, and the earliest example of a crayon mascot I found was from the year 1989:

I got further evidence to support a 1989 date from a listing that included 2 boxes of Crayola crayons from 1990 and one from 1988. Both of the 1990 boxes feature a blue anthropomorphic crayon, but there's not one on the 1988 box.

According to the now-defunct crayoncollecting.com, there was a Canada-exclusive metallic crayon box from 1987, featuring this mascot. However, I have not been able to corroborate that this image is actually from the first 1987 wave, so I am inclined to stick with a date of 1989.

Beginning in 1989, Tip appeared regularly on both Crayola boxes and the Crayola website.

In the late '90s, Tip also appeared together with other (usually unnamed) crayons.

The Dark Age

Some time between 2005 and 2010, Tip disappeared from crayon boxes and from the Crayola website. Instead of incorporating these cute crayons, Crayola packaging included ads for their online coloring page creator and other digital tie-ins. This corresponded to a larger shift to web-based integration across industries.

Redesign and Expansion

All hope was not lost for Tip, however. By 2014, Crayola had reintroduced Tip as a mascot. Freshly redesigned, Tip can be seen in this 2015 Happy Hannukah post on the Crayola Facebook page:

On a personal note, I prefer Tip's original design to the updated 2014 version.

By 2021, several new characters had joined as mascots, and appeared on the website. These mascots represent an additional level of redesign, with colored irises and gender-defining features like eyelashes.

About 20 of these characters appeared on the footer of the website, cementing their central role as mascots.

In 2025, Crayola revealed that several of these characters were formerly retired colors, and had names (some of which corresponded to their hue).

They even got their own webpages explaining their personalities and interests, though unfortunately Tip did not get a page of his own.

So how do all these new characters relate to Tip? According to a 2024 Facebook post from the Crayola account, each of these characters belongs to the "Mr. Tip Family". So we can infer that they're all related.

Evidently the Mr.Tip family has grown in the last two years, because the footer of the Crayola website now features over 30 crayons.

The Search Continues

At this point in my research, I was a little bit frustrated and disappointed. While I had learned more than I ever imagined about the history of Crayola mascots, I hadn't learned hardly anything about Tip's story. My whole aim in doing this was to get to the bottom of Tip's lore.

Since I had exhausted all the traditional sources (Google, Wikipedia, the Crayola website), I had to go deeper. I went to my university's library and searched up all the books about Crayola I could find. They were all kids' books, and were of limited utility.

None of them were helpful. They talked about the science of color and Crayola's history, but not a single one mentioned Tip.

At this point, I thought about how I learned about other companies' mascots. Some of that was from their TV commercials. I watched a bunch of old Crayola TV commercials to no avail. Tip didn't appear there either.

I even watched a playthrough of the 2007 game for the Nintendo DS, Crayola Treasure Adventures. While Tip is the narrator of the game, he doesn't really talk about himself. Instead, he mainly explains gameplay and plot points. In fact, he doesn't talk at all - the game has no voice lines, just speech bubbles.

I had really wrung my resources dry at this point, and I was about ready to give up. Maybe the only information that exists about Tip is the paragraph on the back of that 64-count box.

Before giving up, I found one last resource: Crayola Art Studio 1995. This was a video game for Windows 95, and it included a few cutscenes involving Tip. These were the only clips of Tip speaking I've been able to find. The first one is the most informative as far as lore goes:

From this video we learn the following:

• Tip was indeed born in 1903.
• Each Crayola crayon is one of Tip's brothers and sisters.
• Crayons age extremely slowly. Tip (92 years old at the making of this video) explains that he's still a kid in crayon years.
• Tip might be able to change his color "Yesterday, I was feeling a bit blue".

Tip later takes these kids on a tour of the Crayon factory. I'm not including that full segment, but here are a couple of clips:

This clip, however, suggests that Tip has the same weaknesses as a normal crayon (Falling in hot wax would cause him to melt) We can also infer that Tip has a bit of a daredevil personality, as he teeters on the edge of a life-or-death situation for fun.

Once again, near the end of this tour, Tip reiterates that he was born in 1903, though it seems from the rest of the tour that Tip's birth refers to his creation in a factory.

Reconciling the Two Accounts

These two accounts do not fully agree as to Tip's creation and story.

According to the 1995 video, Tip was born in the first batch of crayons from the Crayola production line in 1903. We also know that Tip is part of an expansive family, as each other Crayola Crayon is one of Tip's siblings. Crayons also age very slowly, with a 90-year-old crayon being still considered a kid.

If we compare this to the back of the box, it seems like Crayola did a bit of a retcon, retroactively changing Tip's lore to make him a spirit. While they kept his 'birth' in 1903, details of the story were changed, as was the source of his youthfulness (being a spirit instead of crayons ageing slowly.)

At this point, I had found everything I could on the internet and at the library. To finish my quest, I headed to the Crayola Experience in the Mall of America.

Investigating in Person

Okay, so I didn't fly across the country just for this blog post. My brother was getting married in Minnesota, and this was a convenient stop.

The Crayola Experience looks like a really fun thing to do if you're a kid. However, admission was about $30 (which is a lot of money for me). On top of that, it would for sure be weird if I, a grown man, did it by myself, so I elected not to visit the whole thing.

Instead, I enjoyed the free parts of the attraction, namely the store. According to the map, it has the "largest and most unique selection of Crayola products in the world."

Even from a distance, it was clear the Crayola experience was not to be missed. The hall was littered with Crayola statues.

When I got to the entrance, I was thrilled to see a large statue of Tip (2015 redesign) as the primary crayon welcoming visitors.

That thrill was short-lived when I discovered what was inside.

The End of Tip?

After all this research, I was hoping to:

1. Learn more about Tip and/or
2. Buy some Tip merch

at the Crayola experience.

As I walked around, I was unable to find a single piece of information on Tip. What's worse, it looks like he's being replaced.

While the 96-count crayon box I have at home talks about Tip, this new one instead introduces the 'Crayon Crew', which does not include Tip. I rushed to the 64-count boxes and saw that they, too, featured the Crayon Crew. What's worse, Tip has been replaced on the front of the box by Scarlet, a different red crayon.

As I scoured the store, I didn't find a single piece of Tip merch. There were, however, plush toys for members of the retired crayons and some of the Crayon Crew.

It looks to me like the Mr. Tip family has quietly become the Crayon Crew. In all honesty, It's probably better to have a fun group of crayon mascots than some immortal spirit that has taken the form of a crayon. I'm sad to see Tip go. He was the face of Crayola at the time in my life that I most used crayola products.

There's still a glimmer of hope. Tip was retired for about 10 years in the early 2000s, and Crayola brought him back. Hopefully, they'll realize the error of their ways and my children will color with crayons with Tip on the box.

Conclusion

After all that, I'm pretty sure I know more about Crayola's mascots than basically anyone on the planet. And since you read this blog post, now you do too.