Staying between the lines

As we grew up, my friends began to pick a talent to stay with — I left the art to the artists and chose writing. I didn’t really think about colours or paints or any of the things I had so enjoyed in my childhood until I saw that suddenly everyone I knew had an “adult colouring book.” My initial reaction was to feel myself superior to them. I even drew my own elaborate shape and proceeded to fill it all in with colour pencils, but the soothing, calm joy my friends seemed to gain from their books was missing.

In 2013, Johanna Basford’s A Secret Garden first came out. Basford, a Scottish illustrator, was approached by publishers to do a colouring book for children, but she thought one for adults would work better. It became the number one bestseller on Amazon in 2015, selling 1.4 million copies worldwide. According to my friend, who presented me with a copy of Basford’s first, her local bookseller in Australia had rows and rows of just colouring books on display in prominent positions. Little did she (or I) know that we were part of a drift that swept the world in 2015 with opinion pieces and reportage on why adults were suddenly into this strange, not altogether conventional hobby. Basford may have started the fad, but publishers were all over it, and at last count, the adult colouring book stable includes old covers of Mills & Boon novels, and themes like Bollywood (with Indian inspired designs), Game of Thrones, vintage patterns, and about a thousand Mandala ones.

A word in passing about why today’s adults are yearning for the simpler things from their childhood. Maybe it’s our particular generation — in our late twenties or mid-thirties, we are suddenly left stranded on Grown-Up Island with no padding to keep us from the big mean world. It’s not everyone, I know, but has there ever been a generation more spoilt than ours? We were told to follow our dreams, and everyone took those words at face value — dropping high-paying jobs to travel around the world, living off our parents in order to write the next great novel, starting apps for just about everything from selling your old clothes to washing your windows. We came of age with the internet, and as a result, we feel like our fates are somehow tied up with the world wide web. Since that’s still in a stage, where so much potential is yet unrealised, we feel we’re pretty much in the same space ourselves. An example: the new line of Ladybird books that have come out for grown-ups. The Ladybird Book of The Hipster or The Ladybird Book of the Hangover, all tongue-in-cheek and look-we-can-laugh-at-ourselves, and yet, and yet, we’re lapping it up with a spoon.

While the Ladybird books are meant to be ironic, colouring books definitely aren’t. They’re all about relieving stress, being self soothing and mindfulness. By owning and using and discovering A Secret Garden, I had joined a club I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of. First, I laughed it off, “Oh, I have a colouring book!” and to my amazement, most people I told this to said, “Yes! Me too! Isn’t it amazing?”

“The problem is,” said my friend who initiated me into this whole thing, “I’m doing a picture and it’s really ugly, you know? I don’t know why it looks so unattractive.” I had the same moment of clarity myself, halfway through turning a flower into 20 shades of pink (hot, neon, magenta and more). This was not a pretty flower. But I had invested in a sketch pen set of 50 and I felt honour bound to use up all those shades. Plus, what they don’t tell you — if you use too much of the same colour, your picture might look uniform but you get so bored. Because some bits of this art as a meditative form are just plain boring. How many trees can you shade with different browns? You begin to long for kids’ colouring books because those are made with ADD in mind, and in our twenty-tabs-open-at-the-same-time world, who really has the patience to stick with one colour for all the different trees?

And, there lies the rub. Unless you’re that kind of person, the Pinterest-using, crafts-making person with a drawer full of wrapping paper, adult colouring books can be really boring. They’re fun for about the first 15 minutes you do a picture, you’re enjoying the colouring, and then you look at your picture which is nothing like the glossy plate you’re imagining. Because you’re a grown-up, you can see how terrible the neon green and that baby blue look together, and so the cycle moves from self-soothing to self-loathing until you need a meditation to get over your meditation.

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is a Delhi-based author