What Is an Adult Coloring Book?

At the time of writing this article (August 2015), 1 / 4 of Amazon’s top twenty best-selling books are coloring in magazines. So what exactly is a adult coloring book, and how is it that they are currently outselling top fiction authors with new releases including E.L. James and Paula Hawkins?


Adult coloring books are, very simply, coloring in magazines for grownups. Like children’s coloring books, they are full of outline illustrations designed to be completed with colored pencils, markers, crayons, or whatever other media you intend to use.

What’s in a adult coloring in book?

The real difference between adults’ and kids’ color books is that the grown up versions generally feature less juvenile images and fashions. Instead of superheroes, barnyard animals, and television characters, adult coloring in magazines are more often stuffed with:

components of natural world, including 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 are also many ‘theme’ specific books available, featuring diverse subjects including cars, steampunk designs, and Art Nouveau patterns.

Why are they quite popular?

A Scottish illustrator named Johanna Basford published a fantasy adult coloring books called Secret Garden in 2013, featuring pages of beautifully hand-illustrated ink drawings. The newest York Times reported in March that a Korean pop star named Kim Ki-bum posted a photograph on Instagram of your ‘delicately colored-in floral pattern’ from Secret Garden. During the time, Ki-bum had a massive 1.8 million Instagram followers. The post went viral and helped to ignite the craze.

The growth in rise in popularity of the books reportedly has much about adult relaxation and stress release. Many adults using the books claim that they get the repetitive, low-stress nature of coloring straight into be soothing, relaxing, and a strategy for de-stressing outside the pressures of life and work.

On the list of other benefits of adult coloring in magazines, additionally, they state they enjoy recapturing the nostalgia of childhood by doing an action usually available children. It takes people returning to a less strenuous time, and may even be an easy method for parents to connect and bond making use of their children by sitting as a result of color in with them. Of course, many parents are already happily coloring in kids’ books for decades, however they’ve choices that are not restricted to Dora the Explorer or SpongeBob SquarePants.

To sum up, coloring for adults seems to be an evergrowing past-time which allows adults to chill and unplug in the stress inside their lives, by doing a hands-on activity which involves minimal commitment and maximum nostalgia.
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