I completely didn’t grok the adult coloring books phenomenon when they first came out. Odd for a cartoonist, I guess, but coloring has always been secondary to the drawing process for me.
And then this summer we picked up To the Moon: The Tallest Coloring Book in the World. We still haven’t finished it, and we’ve been working on it in fits and starts… but it’s a helluva lot of fun. And I finally get it.
At some point one evening as I shaded an alien swinging from a fuel tank, I flashed on my parents and me as we colored DoodleArt posters on the coffee table in the 1970s. Nice to know there’s a multicoloured line from their coffee table to ours.
Coloring can be wonderfully relaxing, even meditative. Which is why it shows up (along with this cartoon) in Beth Kanter and Aliza Sherman’s The Happy Healthy Nonprofit. “Strategies for impact without burnout” is the book’s subtitle…and if coloring in can help avoid burning out, then pass me the pencil crayons.
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I colour once in a while. I love it. I have two books that I bought at the airport in Calgary, while waiting for a connection. The first is an album with drawings of cities, the other are images of mandalas. I enjoy putting on some jazz music and then drawing inside and outside of the lines. The colours don’t really matter either. It’s so relaxing, and the end result – to see a city, or a beautiful mandala completed – is lovely as well. I’m proceeding slowly, so at this rate I should be done with both books in, oh, twenty years maybe?