Adult colouring books are popular, and boring,
Why are today’s colouring books sexed up, zenned out and being made for grown ups?
There was a winter where I passed the time meticulously recreating Van Gogh’s Starry Night, then Sunflowers, then Andrew Wyeth’s Cristina’s World, and then, as my aesthetic sense developed, a spotted leopard on a black velvet canvas. As a child, I’d become obsessed with paint-by-numbers, the game where you mimic artistic genius by closely following directions.
It wasn’t hard, but it felt like work, gratifying to see the images come to life under the mild effort of my hand.
I’ve been thinking of my childhood fascination with numbered paint pots recently, in considering the adult colouring book craze. And it is a craze — for the past few years, more and more grown ups have been picking up the crayons and giving themselves permission to colour inside some lines. The CBC reported earlier this week that one art store in Calgary, Mona Lisa Artists’ Materials, sells more than 50 grown-up colouring books per week. George R.R. Martin is planning to oversee an authorized Game of Thrones colouring book, which one presumes will depict violent images, and like the hit show, will require both a strong stomach and parental discretion. In 2013, artist Shea Seranno released, with the rapper Bun B, a hip hop colouring book where megafans could freak Ghostface Killah’s Clarks and put a twinkle in Missy Elliott’s eye.
And now, Little, Brown has released a line of colouring books intended as a kind of self-help, as a series called “Colour Your Way to Calm.” There may in fact be some evidence that colouring has a calming effect, even for people who have long graduated kindergarten; as an offshoot of the positive psychology movement, the idea is that colouring is a mindful activity that centres your thoughts and gives you the warm, nostalgic fuzzies.
Zoé de las Cases’ Secret Paris certainly satisfied in that regard. And while I was colouring in the Parisian chic line drawings of shoes, makeup, bistro classic dishes and lovely French streetscapes, I wasn’t twitching to check my phone. I kept the book on my desk all last week, with pencil crayons, and had a great time colouring in a small pattern or two while I waited for my occasionally over-burdened computer to load programs for work, and after dinner, shading in ornate landscapes from Rosie Goodwin and Alice Chadwick’s Splendid Cities was an initially very relaxing practice.
But not necessarily more or less relaxing than wasting time with the puzzle games I sometimes play on my phone. Angry Birds, Candy Crush, 2048, they all perform a similar function — something I can do without thinking while still having the thrill of (false) accomplishment. Racking up a high score, progressing onto the next level, or putting the final cherry-coloured flourish on the page of an adult colouring book — in the end, literally none of it matters. I haven’t learned anything, connected with anyone, or even really developed a stronger sense of self.
After about a week, and, due to an over-careful hand, only a few pages coloured in, I became really bored of Secret Paris and Splendid Cities. Just as I became bored of the games I’ve played on my phone, of Sudoku, and as a child, of paint-by-numbers. I wish it were that I found myself craving loftier accomplishments, but really I think that I prefer the act of doing nothing to feel like doing nothing, instead of like a little something.
Until of course, a new and novel kind of nothing comes along, a nothing to calm, and eventually bore, me all over again.