Adult Coloring Books are all the rage now. Is it worth the money?
If you like to color with your kids, or just because, or if you liked to color as a child, then you will probably enjoy coloring these. The pages are more difficult with intricate designs, not simple shapes as with children's coloring books, especially the younger ones. Some children's coloring books can be quite intricate, however! Adults might feel strange coloring cartoon characters, and you won't find any of those in books labeled adult coloring. You will find patterns, mandalas, animals, and plants.
You want to try before you buy? Feel like an entire book is an investment? There are plenty of free pages. FREE FREE You can search for images and copy paste them to Word and print them out. Here are a few I tried.
You could also make your own with programs that allow you to take your photos and modify them with black and white outlines. photoshop adobe photoshop elements
Download fotosketcher
Coloring provides benefits for kids.. AND adults (Huffpost) (LifeHack).
I know for me coloring provides some down time to relax and think. As an introvert, I need space and quiet time to get inside my head. Coloring doesn't help me work out all the problems. I am too focused on the logical elements of colors and creating to allow myself to completely imagine and discover solutions to problems as when in a dream-like state. It does lower my stress, by providing a relaxing tone. I can better think through problems afterwards. Coloring can take place while watching movies or shows, especially re-runs or movies you've seen before. You can pause to watch the best parts. Besides, it hurts your hand to color for a full 2 hours! Coloring to music may help relax you even more. We used to paint to music in my college art class, to encourage us to really listen and interpret what we heard onto the paper.
The best part for me is, coloring puts me in a 'zone' much like writing. It's the same fountain where stories come from. Sometimes coloring can evoke a story to appear.
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| By far the most popular book out there. |
If you like to color with your kids, or just because, or if you liked to color as a child, then you will probably enjoy coloring these. The pages are more difficult with intricate designs, not simple shapes as with children's coloring books, especially the younger ones. Some children's coloring books can be quite intricate, however! Adults might feel strange coloring cartoon characters, and you won't find any of those in books labeled adult coloring. You will find patterns, mandalas, animals, and plants.
You want to try before you buy? Feel like an entire book is an investment? There are plenty of free pages. FREE FREE You can search for images and copy paste them to Word and print them out. Here are a few I tried.
You could also make your own with programs that allow you to take your photos and modify them with black and white outlines. photoshop adobe photoshop elements
Download fotosketcher
Coloring provides benefits for kids.. AND adults (Huffpost) (LifeHack).
I know for me coloring provides some down time to relax and think. As an introvert, I need space and quiet time to get inside my head. Coloring doesn't help me work out all the problems. I am too focused on the logical elements of colors and creating to allow myself to completely imagine and discover solutions to problems as when in a dream-like state. It does lower my stress, by providing a relaxing tone. I can better think through problems afterwards. Coloring can take place while watching movies or shows, especially re-runs or movies you've seen before. You can pause to watch the best parts. Besides, it hurts your hand to color for a full 2 hours! Coloring to music may help relax you even more. We used to paint to music in my college art class, to encourage us to really listen and interpret what we heard onto the paper.
The best part for me is, coloring puts me in a 'zone' much like writing. It's the same fountain where stories come from. Sometimes coloring can evoke a story to appear.
3 comments:
Coloring Book artist and self-publisher Anne Manera followed me on twitter thanks to this post.
http://www.annemanera.com/index.html
She does simple designs, but her videos show more difficult pages as well. If she can do it, you can do it! Or you can buy her books!
I bought a colouring book earlier this year as a gift for my mother. Neither of us had tried one before, but she had said things like "isn't it interesting that there all these adult colouring books now?" which gave me the hint.
If you buy a book, you don't have to colour every page yourself. You could invite houseguests to choose a page and colour it, or maybe turn some pages into a game where each person colours a little bit and then passes it around the table. Then, perhaps, the colouring book will become a compilation of happy memories.
During the Easter break, I coloured one page in the book I gave Mum. Some thoughts:
- For me, the most enjoyable part is the process of discovery. At the beginning I have no idea what colour everything is going to be, and then shape by shape, I find out. Even though each tiny decision is yours, when you put all those decisions together it feels like you're discovering something that, in a sense, was there all along. So afterwards you can look at the page and think, "Ah, so that's what colour that part is".
- A key part of what makes colouring a meditative activity, I think, is that once you've started colouring a particular shape you are committed to that colour. It's not like drawing on a computer where you can change your mind and replace it with a different colour. There will be times when you wish you'd chosen a different colour instead, but colouring forces you to make peace with the decision that you did make, and press on. This is a good mode of thought to nurture. In the end it will be beautiful anyway.
I actually received an adult coloring book for Christmas from my in laws. It's so sad because the beautiful black and white pages are so lovely that I don't feel right coloring it. :( Maybe I'll stick to the free pages you can get online. ;) … If I ever had time to do it, that is.
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