Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Reviewing An Adult Coloring Book

Midnight Garden: Coloring For Adults

midnight garden coloring book
One of my Valentine gifts this year was a new Adult Coloring book, Midnight Garden. My sweet husband knows me so well! He knows that I love to color and that I love flowers and birds which this book is full of.

I have other coloring books for adults but what I really like about this one is that all of the backgrounds are in black so the colors that I choose to use really pop on each page.

I also love that each page is perforated so that they can be removed before coloring or after. The advantage to removing before coloring is that if I press hard with a colored pencil it won't leave an imprint on the page underneath. I tend to lightly color in spaces but for outlining and some areas I do want to make the color dark.

Coloring is an activity that I have enjoyed for over 6 decades. I can't remember just when I picked up that first crayon but I do know that it was love at first touch and have never really stopped coloring. Naturally, at a young age the coloring was in books for children. As I became old enough to babysit, I would usually encourage the children to color. Sure, I wanted them to enjoy it but it gave me an opportunity to color, too! When my daughters were born, well, you guessed it...they were encouraged to color so that Mommy could color with them. Grandma has coloring books for the grandchildren and of course she has to sit and color with them!

You can imagine my joy when the adult coloring books started to come on the market a few years ago! I don't mind coloring in those little juvenile books but to have images meant for adults to enjoy is just awesome. They certainly present more of a challenge in the art of coloring and are a great stress reliever in the process. Not that I need to be stressed to pick up a colored pencil, crayon or marker; I just love the process as a whole.

adult coloring book
Currently, I prefer using colored pencils while coloring. I love the ability to shade that they offer. Sometimes you can do that with crayons and markers, also but the pencils just do a better job in my opinion. The image to the right is a page from the Midnight Garden book that I did with my colored pencils. I just love the way it turned out.

Adult coloring books have become very popular in the last few years. My last trip to the book store was a pleasant surprise with several options available. They have even started Adult coloring clubs in the store. There is enough interest that they have opened the store to the clubs two nights a week. Isn't that cool?

How about you? Do you love to color? When was the last time you picked up a crayon or colored pencil and let your creativity out? It can be very relaxing and almost therapeutic in many ways. There are a lot of times that I will sit down to color a page to allow myself to focus on something else entirely. I may be working on a writing piece and feel a little bit of a block in how I want to write a passage. If I sit down and color for a while, I can think through the blockage. It might not work for everyone but for me it is a way to meditate and come up with a better writing job. Most of the time, I just color for the joy of coloring, though. 



Note: The author may receive a commission from purchases made using links found in this article. “As an Amazon Associate, Ebay (EPN) and/or Esty (Awin) Affiliate, I (we) earn from qualifying purchases.”


9 comments:

  1. I also love to color and I published my own coloring book too. It's at Amazon and in book stores. State Flowers of the USA Coloring Book. More for teachers and students but the flowers are botanical drawings. Working on my second book too. :)

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    Replies
    1. I will have to go check that out, Heather! Sounds like something that I would really enjoy.

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  2. Oh, I love the coloring pages with black backgrounds! As I read your article, I was sitting here thinking of all the craft things we could do with those coloring pages once they were finished. I could easily imagine the one you have featured here as the front page of a scrapbook. I know you enjoy crafts Bev. Have you used any of your colored pages to create fabulous things? I can easily believe with a bottle of Modge Podge you would be busy making tons of additional things. Ironically, until you wrote this article, I hadn't given the adult coloring books much consideration beyond knowing they were in existence and gaining in popularity. I can see that I need to pay more attention. The stress reliever alone makes for an excellent recommendation.

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    Replies
    1. Well, Miss Mouse, my mind had not gone to crafting with the colored pages. Lord knows, I have enough of them to do something with! Now, you have my mind going!

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  3. Like Mouse, I have been aware of the growing popularity of adult coloring books, but didn't think about trying them until reading this review. I know that my daughter, an artist, finds painting on dark and black pages gives her a very interesting look, so can imagine this Midnight Garden coloring book with black backgrounds would be equally sensational.

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  4. I've never seen a coloring book with black backgrounds. I love it!

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  5. Very nice, I like the dark backgrounds too....

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  6. I haven't done any coloring in a very long time, since using my hands that way is hard now. It does look like fun. I have tons of coloring books in my inventory suitable for adults. Maybe someday I'll have time to try my hand at using one. Meanwhile, I use my camera to express myself with colors. I will pass this post on.

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  7. I haven't done any coloring in a very long time, since using my hands that way is hard now. It does look like fun. I have tons of coloring books in my inventory suitable for adults. Maybe someday I'll have time to try my hand at using one. Meanwhile, I use my camera to express myself with colors. I will pass this post on.

    ReplyDelete

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