Colouring helps me unwind, calm my noisy mind and feel centred. I have always been a creative person but working with colour pencils was not something I had tried or been attracted to.
But that’s until I happened to come across Johanna Basford’s ‘Secret Garden’ colouring book at a book store. It’s simply beautiful —full of artwork of flowers, birds, trees; and the paper is thick and has a hand-made feel to it. So, I just had to have the book; it’s what inspired me to get started with adult colouring.
Though I bought a box of sketch pens with the book as I have never been big on colour pencils (always found them cumbersome and boring), I soon realised the restrictions of working with sketch-pens — there are limited colours, you can’t get subtle effects nor have shades or grades of colour. So in some time, I decided to give colour pencils a shot. And since then, I have grown to love colour pencils — they are quite simply my favourite medium for colouring now.
The illustration above from Johanna’s book is one I really enjoyed colouring, I used a mix of water-colour pencils and normal colour pencils for this one. And drew a couple of birds on the scarecrow, in addition to the ones that were already there. By the time I had finished colouring, I had a big smile on my face just like the scarecrow!
The next time you are fuming about something or are all wound up, give an adult colouring book a shot. And do share your work in the comments section below. Enjoy!