Coloring books are suddenly catching on with adults | Hacker News Reader

Coloring books are suddenly catching on with adults

qz.com

55 pointsprostoalex50 comments

I don't see how coloring is any different from doing puzzles, playing board games, building Lego, having waterfights (or other simulated "war" e.g. laser tag), all of which have been popular adult pastimes for a while now...

Seems like people go through phases: Childhood (where fun is seen as normal), teenagehood (where teenagers try to separate themselves from childhood things), young-adults (where they discover it is "ok" to be whoever they want), and adults who just don't give a damn anymore (although some people still care WAY too much what other people think, see 'Keeping Up with the Joneses' etc).

Maybe if adults would stop caring what others thought about them so much, they could just have childhood fun without feeling ashamed or guilty. The world would likely be a better place, with less stress, and more fun.

I would say there's a degree of distinction between paint-by-numbers, versus coloring with magic markers or crayons. As with any craft or skill, including visual arts, there's opportunities for advancement.

But yeah, nothing wrong with relaxing pastimes, and aimless meandering. Not everything has to be a mad rush toward some greater goal or executed in the edification of some grand and auspicious endeavor.

Girlfriend has pretty deep mental health issues, she got one of these for Christmas and it works really well as a coping technique. Takes her mind off of whatever she's obsessing about and instead she gets lost in colouring. Highly recommended as a distraction to an overthinking brain.

I make colouring(with paint) books for kids on iPad and have been giving serious thought to make adult ones. Do you think your girlfriend would interested in working on a digital surface?

I hope you'll post a follow-up to that in a few months, I am curious about it.

My (unsubstantiated) opinion is that the contact with a physical piece of paper (emphasis on physical) has much more impact than we think.

Personnaly I like zen doodling :).

I reckon I will put something up on my blog. Its a game dev blog but my painty endeavours have a great deal of influence on that side of my work. I would love todo something in VR that took the best from tactile and digital.

Sorry, only just noticed my comment actually got replies. She's not really too into digital surfaces, she prefers using pen(cil) and paper wherever she can. So for my specific use-case it probably wouldn't be to fruitful, but there may be other people who feel differently. I'd say go for it and see what comes of it!

Our family recently got a coloring book as a gift called Splendid Cities. I thought it was strange that it was filed under self-help. It's subtitled, "Coloring Your Way to Calm." My wife and daughter colored opposite sides of a symmetrical picture of onion domes. Intricate and rewarding, and yes, a relatively calm part of the day.

A friend of mine said that the Anatomy Coloring Book has been quite helpful to memorize the myriad structures that compose the human body.

Just googled this book. Turns out Amazon also offers a Kindle version :)

One thing I'm surprised the article hasn't mentioned is that coloring is also a profession, and there are people whose careers center around coloring line art (typically using Photoshop and a Wacom tablet). They're called colorists (and some people are now saying "color artist"), and they're core parts of a typical comic book creative team. They get their names listed on the cover and everything.

Some of these new coloring books for adults may actually serve a very practical purpose: to provide practice material for potential colorists.

Speaking of comic books, some of these new coloring books for adults are put out by Marvel Comics. What makes these books "for adults" is that they are filled with un-colored line art from actual comics Marvel has published, and they cherry-pick pages with high levels of detail. You color in one of those books, you're replicating work that's been done by actual professionals. This isn't kids' stuff at all. It honestly makes me wonder if Marvel is publishing these books specifically as a recruiting tool for colorists.

The company I work for (BoredPanda) featured a post about the "Enchanted Forest"[1] over 3 months ago, which gained the author loads of attention. Later she sent us one of the coloring books, we still have it in the office.

A couple of months later, I saw an ad in my Facebook feed, a Lithuanian publisher was selling it here (normally, the books and etc are published here quite a bit later, because it's a tiny market, it was surprising). Although I have pretty much nothing to do with the content we publish, it still felt great knowing it helped to change someones career :)

[1] http://www.boredpanda.com/coloring-books-for-adults-johanna-...

Loads of attention is an understatement. The book was literally #1 on ALL of Amazon books in the US for quite a while [1]. The press worked on me. I picked one up after reading an article because a few months prior I'd found myself on vacation continuing to color a page from my toddlers' coloring book long after she'd went to bed and found it incredibly relaxing.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/05/colouring-books...

How in the world could that article miss out on any of Theo Nicole's amazing coloring books, Mer World Problems, Unicorns are Jerks, Fat Ladies in SPAAAAACE, and Dinosaurs with Jobs.

These are fun adult/everyone coloring books with great art and humor and make amazing gifts. I've seen these sell out at conventions consistently.

http://www.amazon.com/Theo-Nicole-Lorenz/e/B005HHMSMY/

Suddenly? I thought this had already been going on for a year or two.

Look at you on the early side of the coloring book adoption curve, while us mainstreamers find out through HN :)

I see them in discount stores as well, so the hype has probably passed... (guessing that you're from the Netherlands as well)

You guessed correctly.

The "Anti Coloring Book" series (http://www.susanstriker.com/anticoloring.html) is also a clever idea.

Man, that website is like stepping back in time. I'm sure it does the job though :-)

Not sure if I was pleased or disappointed to discover this was not an implementation of the "all progress comes from pr0n" meme.

Not discussed was the obvious manga / anime / comic book theme. Why the game of thrones and abstract art themes mentioned in the article, and not coloring manga or a book themed on anime? Maybe the copyright/licensing situation is super weird in those fields, I can't imagine no one has ever thought of it.

There have been "Adult" coloring books (often with a BDSM theme) being released for a few years now. Quite expensive, but I've had fun coloring the pages with other people at events.

You likely won't see sexually-explicit coloring books becoming popular on bestseller lists, due to the overall puritanical nature of the UK and the US. I wouldn't be surprised if some more liberal countries such as Denmark or Belgium's bestseller list reflected this.

I've seen a "Zombie coloring book", complete with pithy descriptions of how people have died in various ironic ways.

"A FORTRAN Coloring Book" - http://www.amazon.com/FORTRAN-Coloring-Book-Roger-Kaufman/dp...

...and here I was ashamed to tell anyone about my very recent addiction to jigsaw puzzles.

As a child growing up in the 70s and 80s, our family used to love colouring these:

http://doodleartworld.com/

The next stage of infantalisation. I never thought it would get this bad!

Yeah! Adults should stop doing that childish stuff, like oolouring, watching cartoons, reading fantasy and sci-fi, eating sweets, playing video games and bordgames and roleplaying games, cosplaying, laughing at toilet humour, collecting stamps and postcards and action figures, make funny faces, eat junk food... :)

My favourite quote:

"To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C. S. Lewis

> because we're grown-ups now, and it's our turn to decide what that means

https://xkcd.com/150/

Infantilisation is treating someone else as a child, not doing activities traditionally seen as exclusive of children.

You could easily argue the people selling these books to adults are doing just that.

Could you illustrate how doodling, coloring, or any other distraction is more childish and less childish? Could you also explain why childishness should be shunned in this context?

I'm personally waiting for footie pajamas to be considered office attire. I give it ten more years.

either way, I'm saddened that you are downvoted. If you look through the past fifty years of culture, there is a distinct shift from ultra-masculinity and characteristics of maturity being favored to emotions, childlike playing, and feminine attire becming the characteristics that the youth favor in their sexual partners. Do we not want to acknowledge this is happening, or was it merely the "tone" we're supposedly downvoting once again?

> If you look through the past fifty years of culture, there is a distinct shift from ultra-masculinity and characteristics of maturity being favored to emotions, childlike playing, and feminine attire becming the characteristics that the youth favor in their sexual partners. Do we not want to acknowledge this is happening, or was it merely the "tone" we're supposedly downvoting once again?

One little nitpick, you forgot to say why this is "bad." You said it is happening, but considering your tone towards the OP (and the remarks about downvotes) I'm guessing you agree that this is a "bad thing" so, why exactly?

Also are you playing the whole "masculinity good," "femininity bad" card? Seems like a rather dated attitude.

He didn't say it was bad because he wasn't judging- just stating that there is a cultural shift.

You would be guessing wrong, should you wish to guess.

Unfortunately, this means your entire post is a Strawman Fallacy.

But more importantly, are you saying our culture is not shifting towards the directions I mentioned?

Unfortunately, this means your entire post is a Strawman Fallacy.

Fallacies apply to arguments. The parent poster made none.

Another part of that trend that I've noticed of late is people calling piss "pee" and shit "poo" or "poop". Just like you did when you were a 2-year-old and Mommy said you had "poo poo diapers" that needed changing.

"pee" and "poop" are like the base terms for those two things. With "piss" and "shit" being the crude terms, and "poo" or "wee" being the more childish terms. This is the most stupid conversation I've ever had on this website.

Not sure if I speak for all Australians, but to me "pee" and "poop" sound very juvenile. "Poo" and "wee" would be the standard options.

Hearing parents using terms like "willie" or "pee pee" with toddlers in place of "penis" strikes me as really odd and awkward.

Frankly it's more infantile that Americans insist on talking about "restrooms" when it's clear you're not going there to have a lie-down.

Oh, that goes back a long ways, and goes across cultures too. It's a human thing, not an "American" thing. Maybe you can find some culture somewhere in the world that unironically hangs signs that idiomatically translate to "The Shitters ->", but it'll be the exception rather than the rule.

I'm trying to figure out what term you think is appropriate. Water closet?

Restroom is one of those writing-only words, in my experience.

I don't think anyone really associate the the "rest" in "restroom" with resting. May as well call it infantile to call it a "bathroom" when only children take baths.

> only children take baths.

Huh?

I regularly take baths. They are very relaxing and help me de-stress. They are also good for relieving some types of pain.

Right, I resist calling it a bathroom in places where it won't actually have a bath. Guess I should start asking at restaurants where the water closet is?

I'm surprised at this, as in my experience, the overwhelming trend in north america is to avoid talking about bodily functions at all costs, nearly to the point of denying they happen.

The words they use after they break this nigh-impenetrable barrier are usually codified in the most non-offensive ways possible. Someone having a conversation about "shit", for instance, will have a far more uncomfortable audience in North America than someone passively mentioning the existence of "poo" to a group of people. Often, the very subject's focus in a conversation will make listeners question the mental health of the speaker (seriously).

TL;DR - The culture around bodily functions is way crazier than what we call them.

I've noticed this, and it is actually a pain in the butt (minor pun intended) because when you try to book a hotel room or want to look at a home to buy/rent online, they almost never ever include pictures of the "restroom." Even if the size/functionality is a legitimate feature that you're paying for.

Fortunately with travel sites like Tripadvisor often include photos from your average tourists who didn't get the memo about "never take a photo of the bathrooms ever!" and thus you get to see what you're in for with the accommodation. There's no alternative with home shopping, other than physically visiting the place.

the overwhelming trend in north america is to avoid talking about bodily functions at all costs

Unless it's a group of women talking about menstruation, that can go on for hours.

Fun Fact: The sole reason North American women discuss menstruation for more than two sentences is because they're wanting to make the man/men sitting near them uncomfortable.

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