Crayola Color Alive: is the app still available?

No. Crayola Color Alive was an augmented reality app made with the company DAQRI: you colored special Color Alive pages with crayons, scanned them with the app, and the character climbed out of the page in 3D. None of the Color Alive apps can be downloaded today. The first one left the App Store in 2019, Color Alive 2.0 was still there in May 2022 but is gone now, and so is Crayola Easy Animator, the app for the Easy Animation Studio kit. Old Color Alive books still work as coloring books, but without the app the pages stay flat.

How Color Alive worked

Crayola announced Color Alive in October 2014 and had it in stores from that winter, for iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows (The Toy Book, 2014). The app was free. You colored a page from a Color Alive book, or a free page printed from the app, scanned it, and the character appeared in 3D on the screen in your child’s colors. Extra page packs cost $1.99 (App Store, July 2015).

Color Alive 2.0 came later and only worked with the new 2.0 pages. It could show two characters at once and record a video. Its last update was in April 2017, and by 2022 it had 1.9 stars from 401 ratings (App Store, May 2022).

What was Easy Animation Studio?

Easy Animation Studio was a Crayola kit from 2015 with a poseable mannequin, a stand for the phone or tablet, a 30-page design book and 12 colored pencils. Your child colored a character from the book and scanned it with the free Crayola Easy Animator app. Then they posed the mannequin in front of the camera, one position at a time, and the app filled in the movement between the poses (The Toy Insider, 2015). The kit sold for $19.99.

The Easy Animator app was still on the App Store in September 2019 and had gone by January 2023 (App Store, September 2019).

Why did Color Alive disappear?

I haven’t found a statement from Crayola about it. DAQRI, the company that built the apps with Crayola, closed in September 2019 (TechCrunch), and the first Color Alive app was gone from the App Store by then. If the app is still installed on an old device, it may open, but there are no updates and it can’t be downloaded again.

Crayola’s apps today are Crayola Create and Play and others from Red Games. Crayola Create and Play is free to try for 7 days and then needs a subscription ($2.99 to $7.99 a month on the US App Store, 31 October 2026). You draw and craft on the screen; it doesn’t scan paper. Crayola Create and Play+ in Apple Arcade has an AR camera, but it shows a digital garden, not your child’s drawing.

Making your child’s own drawing move today

Easy Animation Studio was the closest Crayola came to animating a child’s own character. That’s what I made Levende for, without the mannequin and without special pages: you scan any drawing on paper, and the figure is cut out, gets a skeleton and moves. Levende is an independent app and not connected to Crayola.

• Any paper works: the back of an envelope, a page from a notebook, a drawing from the fridge.
• 20 ready-made moves instead of posing by hand, from walking and jumping to dancing and boxing. You can still drag the skeleton’s joints if the arms ended up in the wrong place.
• Several figures at once on a stage, or in AR on your table, and a video with music.
• Levende never connects to the internet and collects nothing. It costs $1.99, once, with no subscription.

If your child liked coloring printed pages that come to life, Quiver still does that. Disney had the same idea: what happened to Disney Color and Play. Step by step for Levende: how to animate a drawing on iPhone or iPad.