Saturday, January 16, 2016

The Joy of Coloring

I love coloring.

The way simple lines fill with rich color and bloom into something new and unique. The interplay of paper and artistic medium. The smell of freshly sharpened pencils or a new box of crayons.  It relaxes me and makes the day just a little better.

I have colored all my life. When I was little my mother colored with me and showed me all her little tricks. No mention was made of staying in the lines or how a green sky was not right.  From those simple pictures of puppies and flowers I graduated to more dynamic figures from Saturday morning cartoons, Rainbow Brite, Rose Petal, Smurfs and Bugs Bunny danced across the pages.  Eventually I learned to draw and started making my own art (I still kept a collection of my favorite coloring books for those days when I needed a quick fix.)  But I never forgot my first love and with the introduction of Amazon I was once again able to indulge.

Amazon opened a whole new world of coloring books. no more cartoon characters, I now had Art!  My first coloring book from this new era was Flower Fairies.  Instead of coloring in the book I photocopied pages so I could color them over and over.  Other coloring books have followed and Dover keeps printing more and more. 

Image courtesy Lea Latumahina on Flickr
It use to be you would do a search for coloring books or Adult Coloring books and a bare handful came up. Now a search for 'Dover adult coloring books' in Amazon brings up almost 700 results. Soo many choices!  You can find a coloring book on almost any subject, historical costumes, life in other places and times, mythical creatures, dogs, cats, penguins, alphabet books, animal books, plant books, the list goes on and on.