Part of the appeal of these coloring books is that they’re great tools for relaxing and de-stressing. Therapists are hesitant to label it as a form of therapy, but there are benefits to relaxing with some colored pencils (or markers if you’re a barbarian) and some fancy pages.
I’m going to say this right now: coloring was far from relaxing for me. In fact, I think this exercise only increased my stress levels. Let me point out, though, that I’m a big stress ball in general. I’m pretty Type-A and I aim to do things right the first time. Perfectly. And if I don’t, dear god. There’s a reason why I see a therapist.
I grip the pencils too tightly and my hand quickly starts to ache. What shade of green should I make the leaves on this tree? Or should I go for more of a fall coloring? How the hell is Leaf Green different from Apple Green? THEY’RE THE SAME COLOR. Why don’t I have more shades of brown? Crap, I have too many oranges in the same spot. This looks bad. Why are these rocks so tiny? I wish these pencils were brighter. What if I outline this in a lighter color? Nope, looks like garbage. It’s ruined.
This is what happens every time.
Many of the coloring books I tried have some pretty intense designs. The Enchanted Forest and The Time Garden ( A ) have complex, incredibly detailed scenes to color and they often take hours upon hours to finish. I also tried out the Hot Dudes Coloring Book, which is definitely the easiest of the three and more in the novelty area of coloring than something to be used for de-stressing. However, I still agonized over what shade of brown would make my lumberjack’s pants the perfect hue of khaki.
Despite my anxious inner monologue, I didn’t hate the process of coloring. There’s something unique about spending hours coloring individual sections, your face obnoxiously close to the paper as you sit hunched over your coffee table, and then pulling back to look at the entirety of your work. Even if I went outside the lines a little bit or wish I’d used a lighter shade of blue, there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing a page. And you want to hold it up and shout, “Look at this! I made this!” It also doesn’t hurt that my roommates have claimed certain pages that they want me to color for them.
Would I recommend the coloring craze? Definitely. Regardless of if you need a relaxing, meditative activity or not, I think that people who give it a shot will get something out of it. Whether it’s a few minutes to shut their brain off for a while or just something cool to hang on the fridge, there’s accomplishment, and it’s not hard to achieve, either.
#TeamMarkers
Fight me!
I would recommend Mandalas for you, you don’t have to worry about skin- or leaf colour ^_^
I have started using adult coloring books while I write when I get stuck on a scene or my brain is dead and I need a break. I also bring them out when my boys are coloring and want me to sit by them. I have enjoyed the designs and choosing colors, but then I am definitely not a type A.
Mandalas for the win! However, I’m partial to geometrics, too.
Years ago on Amazon, I bought books with tile patterns, medieval tapestries, Japanese and Chinese designs, prisms, geoscapes, Art Nouveau and infinite designs (these are repetitive and can be a bit boring, though ymmv). My biggest problem was getting access to a copier that wouldn’t bankrupt me while generating additional copies of my favorite designs.
I usually use pencils, but also have crayons and markers. Depending on the design, you simply have to use something capable of deeper color saturation than pencil.
Yeeees I have the Enchanted Forest book and I love it dearly. I’m the sort of person who needs to do things with their hands while watching TV, so I can put on Cutthroat Kitchen or The West Wing and color while it’s on.
I’m Team Staedtler Triplus Fine Pens because they last forever, and they’re fine enough to color in those tiny bits in the book and the colors look lovely on the page.
I am a proud member of #TeamMarkers; I am also Type A and having to sharpen the pencils all the time drove me nuts. I also second the recommendation for mandalas or geometrics; being able to plan out repeating patterns/colors makes this uber-planner exceedingly happy.
I color with my kids in their books sometimes, but for relaxing myself I prefer dot-to-dot. They make some great books with designs that are just the right amount of challenge, so they yield that nice “look what I made!” feeling but with a pretty short time investment. And you can color them after, if you like. I’m working my way through this one now: http://smile.amazon.com/Greatest-Dot—Dot-Book-World/dp/0970043708/
I like knitting–scarfs with a simple instructions like K2,P2 for row after row until I run out of yarn. I really need more mindless simple instructions cause my whole family doesn’t have enough necks for the scarfs. Once I establish a simple pattern I want to just follow it while watching HGTV or something. Anyone got something else to knit mindlessly?
A friend sent me a coloring book and pencils after my knee replacement last spring. Kept me occupied while on heavy duty meds when my mind had a terrible time focusing on anything else due to brain fog.
Let’s talk about that lumberjack. I’m thinking jeans and a plaid shirt. How does one color plaid? Now I’m going to have to go get that book so I can do it myself. The sacrifices I make . . .
Regarding #TeamMarkers, I feel like I press too hard for markers and I don’t want any bleeding through the back. Any recs on some good markers to help combat my aggressive coloring nature?
When I went off to college, one of my still in high school friends gave me a jumbo Hello Kitty coloring book because she thought it might be therapeutic. Little did she know this coloring for adults thing would become a sensation
I have been hooked on adult coloring books for awhile. If you have an A.C. Moore near you, they have a large variety of adult coloring books. 2 for $5. I also recommend mandalas. I have groovy mandalas, christmas mandalas, paisley mandalas and if you like mandalas I recommend lotus designs and tessellation patterns. When I color I listen to my books. It’s a great stress management for me, but again I like to sit and watch the grass sprinklers in the summer so I may not be the best judge : )
I loom knit. Yards and yards and yards of i cord lately. (will it be a rug? a purse? just a long snaky thing? Who knows?) Coloring bores me deeply, as it did when I was a child.
I have always been a huge fan of coloring. I LOVE the new adult coloring books because, like a lot of things (Saturday morning cartoons I’m looking at you), coloring books for kids today are dull and boring and so no fun. Good for applique patterns for kids quilts but a non-starter for actual coloring. Coloring books when I was a kid were beautiful and detailed. I can still recall a page from a fairy tales book with a head on of Sleeping Beauty recumbent on a pillow. The hair, the gown, her face… sigh.
The bff gave me a book for my birthday that has a little of everything: mandelas, flowers, landscapes. Along with this came a box Crayola ERASABLE colored pencils. I highly recommend them for the anal retentive among you. Limited color choices and ERASABLE. In return I am giving her the Outlander book that was featured in a post here a month or so ago. It’s due on my doorstep today. Christmas accomplished.
I remember coloring Altair Designs in the 70s and 80s – abstract geometric designs based on Islamic design. My dad got into them and then I started doing them too. Very addictive and less stressful, because they’re abstract and the whole point is to discover different designs.
http://www.amazon.com/Altair-Design-Pattern-Pad-Bk/dp/1907155015
Another vote for mandalas. I also found coloring stressful until I started doing abstract ones. Love both markers and colored pencils. The other fun of coloring is social media — lots of very active and supportive Facebook groups. Great to see the amazing work. (Adult Coloring Worldwide has over 11,000 members and free coloring pages to download. Lots of interesting discussion there about copyright too.) Zentangle is great for destressing too, and no artistic ability required (though it doesn’t hurt!).
@Joy, one of my friends knits blankets out of her leftover scrap yarn while she watches TV, so that might be something new for you to try.
I also get too stressed about coloring books, especially the nice fancy ones. I’m too afraid to ruin the books and the pencils. My solution was to get a GIANT Hello Kitty coloring book and some crayons, so I’m not too really concerned about making sure everything’s perfect.
I bought a bunch of coloring books a few months back. I mostly went with Dover ones, because they have a nice selection of designs and they’re pretty cheap.
I’m #teamcoloredpencils mostly because of bleedthrough concerns, but my collection of Crayolas has been driving me buggy because some of them have decided they do not want to sharpen without the lead breaking. Not the recipe for relaxation. (Picked up a twelve pack of Prang to see if they’re better.)
I’m a counselor and recommend coloring – for its meditative effects and demand-for-focus (goodbye, anxiety! – to my clients all the time. Love-love-love the hot dudes color book. Might get me in a little hot water to recommend to my clients, but I can always pick it up for myself 😉
#TeamMarkers I really like to color, but if found that I prefer smaller designs that I can finish up more quickly. I don’t like leaving them half done! I found a book of Secret Garden post cards that are awesome! Angie’s coloring books makes a journal with a small design to color that works really well for me, too!
Joy,
Check out http://www.knit-a-square.com. They accept 8×8 squares that they will make into blankets for AIDS orphans. You can use leftover yarn with a simple stitch pattern.
I got the Enchanted Garden book or something similiar, but my fine motor control is shot and I found the experience more frustrating than relaxing.
Perhaps I’ll try the Hot Dudes one; the areas look larger *cough, cough*.
Where did you get the hot dudes coloring book?
I know a lot of people who enjoy coloring including myself, so I have been looking through coloring books, but have never seen hot dudes.
@Emily: I was sent a small sample book, but the full thing won’t be out until February. However, if you’re looking for something comparable to get right now, I definitely recommend Color Me Swoon.
A-hem, there’s an Outlander coloring book which is on my radar, too! I host monthly “coloring nights” where my girls can come over, enjoy some snacks, chat and color. It is a huge success and everyone looks forward to it. Listening to my audio book and coloring is also really fun.
I was given Enchanted garden coloring book and markers. I hated the markers because they ran and so I never got into it.
I wish to go on record that I think it is really miserable that Amazon does not have a “look inside” feature for the Hot Dudes coloring book. Am I really supposed to take someone else’s opinion that these are hot dudes?
I’m the same way: adult coloring books sometimes frustrate me because I get too obsessed over details. I kind of like kids’ coloring books a little more since they’re much simpler. 🙂 But this Hot Dudes book looks like exactly what I need!
I wanted the romance novel cover coloring book from Avon that was apparently given out as swag from the RT Convention.
I have seen these coloring books for adults, and have been tempted to buy them. After reading the post, I’m going to take the leap! BTW, a similar de-stresser is art WITHOUT the pre-set lines. Many communities offer “drink and draw” classes where there is a live model & plenty of wine to get your courage up as you sketch. Great for interacting with other creative types, too. I attend these art classes monthly. It’s a very classy, creative scene. 🙂
My copy of the ‘The Enchanted Forest’ came today. I bought coloring books for two friends of mine for the holidays. When I saw that one in person I needed to get one for myself it’s so beautiful. (Though I’m now wondering if I should have waited for the ‘Artist’s Edition’ to come out. I prefer to work with markers/Sharpies along with colored pencil for my artwork, and ‘The Secret Garden, Artist’s Edition’ has single-sided pages.)
Been getting back into drawing and coloring again because of these books. Drawing and coloring was something that I just ‘did’ when I was younger. I never really thought about whether it was relaxing or not. I just happen to be someone with a lot of creativity that comes out in small bursts. Even though a lot of people like my creations and growing up both friends and family thought I’d be the ‘next Walt Disney’, I’ve never had as much passion for it as I do reading and writing. But the art bug has definitely bitten me again.
As far as being therapeutic, I think that should be open to personal interpretation, and not up to the psychiatric field to decide. Like you said, this is an activity for shutting your brain off for a little while. Some people find fishing or yoga relaxing more therapeutic than coloring. Those aren’t activities I would enjoy myself, but who am I to say that that’s not relaxing for someone else?
Btw, for those with joint pain issues, I’ve seen Prismacolors as a recommended brand that is easy to work with.
http://goo.gl/hK2V9C
This sounds like a fascinating coloring book.
#team markers. Brush pens, to be exact. I like the precision of pencils, but pressing hard enough to get decent saturation makes my wrist hurt. The pens have this lovely gentle motion to them. I’m an artist, and trying to train myself in illustration. But I’m also in process of learning to deal with a chronic illness. (CFS if anyone’s wondering) and have lacked the focus to do full on drawing. Too many steps, too many decisions, too much emotional resilience required (in case it sucks). The coloring books have been a godsend for me, it lets me scratch the creativity itch even on low-energy days, rest my brain, and work on line control and color use in little easy bits. I love it. I do it obsessively. I’m working on my third copy of the same nature mandala book, so I can experiment with the effects of different color schemes on the same image.
Also, a trick for bleed through is to put a paper towel between pages. And @Lostshadows, in my experience Prang>crayola, and prismacolor is better still, but it takes particular sharpeners to handle the delicacy of colored pencils. Weirdly I had the best luck with cheap drugstore ones, but only certain ones. Trial and error aside, I’ve had reliably good luck using a sharpener intended for eyeliner pencils.
I did some colouring and decided that while I could make it tolerably pretty, I wasn’t getting the fancy I really wanted. Then I discovered there are you tube channels full of people doing super fancy colouring. They do leaves by blending and shading different greens, and they work out their colour schemes in advance on test pages. And, they use pastels to colour the backgrounds.
My favourite channel is Peta Hewitt – her stuff is beautiful.
It’s made no appreciable difference to my skills, but watching people colour is possibly more relaxing than doing it yourself.
Oh, I get super anal about coloring “perfectly” too. So I use it less as a “de-stressing” tool, and more of a “letting go” tool. As in, it’s a way for me to work on not being so anal about stuff and allowing myself to be more free and “flowy.”
I actually sit down with the big box of crayola markers (because the bold colors will never really look “real” so I don’t have to stress about that, and also the amount of ink makes the process less manual, and you see results quickly) and tell myself, out loud, “It’s ok. It’s not a design contest. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or even pretty.” Very self-helpy 😉 But it works.
we no longer have to be sad that our children grow too old for coloring–now we can color more fanciful things
Perfect timing for this post. I just got back from an early Christmas with my family and came home with two coloring books – The Enchanted Forest and a similar Christmas one. My aunt thinks they’ll help with my hand which has nerve damage. I used to paint so I think I’ll really like this. She sent me the pencils, but I may have to hunt down those fine line markers now.
I love my Prismacolor set and especially the Prismacolor watercolor pencils. They don’t soak through the pages of my coloring books, and they dry really fast. I’m currently switching back and forth between Enchanted Forest and Christmas mandalas. I can’t just sit and watch TV so if my left hand is hurting I stitch, and if my right hand hurts I can color!
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I echo the vote for Prismacolor pencils. They’re a joy to work with–the color goes on beautifully–and they come in many many colors. They can even be bought individually, which is a great thing. Downside: they’re pretty expensive; best use ever for Michael’s coupons.