Before penning this article (August 2015), one fourth of Amazon’s top twenty best-selling books are coloring in magazines. So what exactly is a grown-up coloring book, and how is it that they may be currently outselling top fiction authors with new releases such as E.L. James and Paula Hawkins?
Adult coloring books are, plain and simple, coloring in magazines for older people. Like children’s coloring books, they may be brimming with outline illustrations meant to be completed with colored pencils, markers, crayons, or whatever other media you would like to use.
What’s within an adult coloring in book?
The gap between adults’ and kids’ color books would be that the grown up versions generally feature less juvenile images and styles. As an alternative to superheroes, barnyard animals, and television characters, adult coloring in magazines tend to be more often full of:
aspects of the natural world, such as trees, flowers, leaves, gardens, animals and insects;
geometric designs;
psychedelic patterns;
repetitive ‘wallpaper’ type patterns;
cities and buildings;
anatomical drawings;
goddesses, angels, and mermaids;
mandalas; and
celtic designs.
There’s also many ‘theme’ specific books available, featuring diverse subjects such as cars, steampunk designs, and Art Nouveau patterns.
Are they all so popular?
A Scottish illustrator named Johanna Basford published a adult coloring book pages called Secret Garden in 2013, featuring pages of beautifully hand-illustrated ink drawings. The newest York Times reported in March that the Korean pop star named Kim Ki-bum posted a photograph on Instagram of the ‘delicately colored-in floral pattern’ from Secret Garden. At that time, Ki-bum were built with a massive 1.8 million Instagram followers. The post went viral and helped to ignite the craze.
The expansion in popularity of the books reportedly has much related to adult relaxation and stress release. Many adults using the books state that they find the repetitive, low-stress nature of coloring directly into be soothing, relaxing, along with a strategy for de-stressing outside the pressures of life and work.
One of many other benefits of adult coloring in magazines, they also claim to enjoy recapturing the nostalgia of childhood by starting a task usually available to children. It takes people back to a simpler time, and may even be an easy method for fogeys to connect and bond with their children to stay down to color together with them. Naturally, many parents happen to be happily coloring in kids’ books for years, these days they’ve choices which are not limited to Dora the Explorer or SpongeBob SquarePants.
In summary, coloring for adults appears to be an increasing past-time that allows adults to chill and unplug through the stress within their lives, by starting a hands-on activity that requires minimal commitment and maximum nostalgia.
More details about adult coloring book pages go to our new web page: read this