Crayola Color Alive

Zift Advisory

Note: This app is no longer available in the App Store or the Google Play Store. Crayola Color Alive is a child's augmented reality and animation app that uses special coloring books and your mobile device. This app is available in the App Store and the Google Play Store, is rated for users of all ages, and features in-app purchases.

About Crayola Color Alive

What is Crayola Color Alive?

Note: This app is no longer available in the App Store or the Google Play Store.

Crayola Color Alive is a child's augmented reality and animation app that uses special coloring book pages and your mobile device to add movement and special effects to their coloring projects.

This app is available in the App Store and the Google Play Store. It is rated for users of all ages and feature in-app purchases.

After coloring their pages, children can hover their device’s camera over their artwork to bring it alive within the app. Once the app is downloaded, two Action Coloring Pages are offered for free, with more coloring pages available for purchase within the app or participating retailers.

Special crayons or markers are not required in order to animate pages. The pages themselves are specially encoded in order to be read and animated via the app, which will pick up and transfer the colors used on the page and map them onto appropriate 3D models. These models will “come to life”, moving and interacting with the user when viewed through the Crayola Color Alive app.

Four coloring page themes were initially available to users of the Crayola Color Alive app:

Mythical Creatures – Featuring typical medieval fantasy creatures, such as dragons and knights.
Barbie – Fashions and activities related to the Barbie series of toys and pets.
Enchanted Forest – “Peaceful” fantasy creatures in an animated, enchanted forest full of pixies and unicorns.
Skylanders – Animated battles between factions of Skylanders characters and toys.

Additional themes built around licensed properties, such as Marvel's Avengers and Disney's Frozen, are also available in some retail locations.

A set of “special effect” crayons let kids add effects to their creation, such as sparkles or shimmering effects, before animating their creation by hitting the 4D button on their mobile app. The moving drawings can be captured for printing and sharing, and children can pose with their favorite characters simply by stepping into the frame.

The Color Alive app is available for Android, iOS, and Windows phone and tablets. Not all devices are compatible with the app, however, so check if your device can run the app before purchasing Color Alive pages or coloring books.

Is Crayola Color Alive safe for my kids?

While the Crayola Color Alive app is safe for children, there are two major drawbacks.

The first is technical, as animated figures will occasionally disappear without warning. Keeping the device perfectly still during animation is the only certain way to keep them “alive” and moving, which can be a challenge for excited kids.

Second, there are only two, relatively basic Color Alive pages available for free, so you can expect to exhaust the free tier of this app relatively quickly.

The in-app purchases available through this app are easily accessible to kids and quite expensive, at $3.99 per page. Since there are only two pages available for free, kids will likely want to purchase more. Parents will want to consider setting clear expectations and parental controls to prevent out of control spending with this app.

Additional coloring books can be purchased at brick-and-mortar stores for $7.99 each. These books contain sixteen pages each, so you may want to ration them carefully.

Crayola Color Alive is safe for kids but parental controls may be necessary to avoid unwanted in-app purchases.