Felton “Tad” Colwell is the owner of a company based in Kendallville, Indiana called Colwell Colour. Colwell manufactures paint color sample chips – the kind you find in paint stores that help you figure out the color to paint your dining room or kitchen walls. In fact, Colwell makes all the paint chips for our wonderful partner, Behr Paint, as well as competitors Benjamin Moore, Valspar, and Sherwin Williams. Millions and millions. Gazillions!

Recently Tim Markley, our good friend in Elkhart, Indiana (and printer of the award-winning Fresh Artists Memory Games,) was visiting another Indiana printer about 40 minutes away from his plant, and he said to himself: “I bet Fresh Artists would REALLY like to know this guy.”

Next thing we knew, Roger and Barbara were flying out to Indiana to meet Tad.

This is one terrific guy, we decided. And generous. After we described the work of Fresh Artists and how a beloved Fresh Artists retired (and volunteer) art teacher has developed a dynamic lesson plan transforming humble paint chips into brilliant mosaic “paintings” that help generate money for art supplies in under-resourced public schools, he announced resolutely:

“I see a groundbreaking partnership.”

So do we!

Colwell Colour is going to ship palettes of paint chips to their distributor in Allentown for us to repurpose into art kits, saving them from the landfill. Each palette of paint chips weighs about 1,500 lbs. or just less than a ton. That’s a massive, free, and endless flow of this astonishingly useful new art making tool—paint chips! Fortunately, our new Collaboratory has space to process and store the chips until our partner schools and classrooms need them. Sounds like a pretty terrific partnership to us!

We like our new best friend.