I’m not exactly sure when the adult coloring fad started. According
this website called ColorPlaner.com, which might be biased, the first adult
coloring book was published in 1961. It was a satirical work called The
Executive Coloring Book. It poked fun at executives. Other coloring
books published in the Sixties and Seventies included 1964’s The Gay Coloring Book, which included
coloring pictures like this one:
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| The caption says, "This is my uncle. Color him fabulous." OH. MY. GOD. |
ColorPlaner.com argues that adult coloring books were very
popular during the Sixties and Sevenries, and that they’re just coming back
into vogue as things tend to do. I think the current adult coloring trend
started in 2013, with the publication of Secret
Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book, which may be the most
popular example of its genre.
I’m going to admit, I jumped on the adult coloring bandwagon
with everyone else. I bought colored pencils and markers and a big box of
crayons. I bought a coloring book called Outside
the Lines: An Artist’s Coloring Book for Giant Imaginations, which
inexplicably has one page that is completely black:
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| Uh, this is not a coloring page, guys. |
Followed by a second page that was only mostly black:
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| Also not a coloring page. |
But I didn’t just buy the one coloring book. I went overboard
and bought several coloring books. Jim also bought me a couple of books. My
psychiatrist at the time, who I’ll call Dr. Coloring Book, was really invested in getting me into adult
coloring. He spent almost every session trying to convince me that coloring
would relieve my stress and improve my anxiety, even when I told him that I was
trying it and it was adding to my stress and anxiety.
I used to enjoy coloring when I was a girl. I had a big
shoebox full of more than 400 crayons. I know how many there were because I got
a lot of satisfaction out of counting them; even then I was rather obsessive.
But I don’t remember it taking me forty-seven hours to color
a freaking picture when I was eight years old. I bought a book of mandala
coloring pages and I couldn’t find the time to finish even one of them. Some of
the designs are so intricate that staying in between the lines is impossible. I
spent a good ten years learning to color inside the lines, and now you give me
lines that I can’t color inside? That’s freaking adulthood for you. Instead of
a meditative and relaxing new hobby, I have a bunch of sloppily incomplete
tasks and a feeling of mounting frustration.
So I bought some kid coloring books. One has pictures of dinosaurs,
and the other has pictures of cats.
Dr. Coloring Book did not approve.
