I haven’t shared much here this past year as I’ve been experiencing creative blocks around surface pattern design and sewing projects. Early in the spring I started work on a new pattern collection and almost immediately got stuck with it. Everything I was working on came to halt and I even stopped sewing. I felt like I was failing at everything, the news just got worse and worse and I felt so helpless about all of it.
Besides the heaviness of external circumstances, something was going on under the surface of my creativity and motivation, and I needed to figure it out. I took another stab at The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and got closer to my inner self than I had been in a long time. She had some things to say. Why was I not listening? Before I could create anything else or make any kind of thing, I had to slow everything down, pause and listen.
As I’ve now come up the other side of this experience, I’ve inadvertently created an adult colouring book themed around the thoughts and feelings I discovered when I got quiet and looked inwards. Initially, the colouring book idea came about as a way to trick myself into drawing motifs for the eventual pattern collection. But as I kept drawing, it became something else entirely, a therapeutic colouring book and I’ve fallen in love with drawing again which is maybe what I needed after all.
I needed to remember why I liked to draw, to recognize that I enjoy the way my brain and body feels when I do it. That’s what my inner self wanted me to know. My reason for drawing isn’t to churn out one product after another. I draw to feel connected to my humanity, I draw to feel sane in a crazy world, I draw to be in competition with myself, to get better at this craft with every attempt, to get closer to what needs to be said.
Now available through Amazon or through my shop via Lulu Direct, There’s Hope in the Haze: A Therapeutic Colouring Book of Pep Talks You Actually Need is filled with twenty-five colouring pages of hand-lettered phrases, little nuggets of wisdom and random thoughts I’d been carrying around in my Notes app, some for a long time. They have been given new life in these illustrations, embraced by florals, animals, celestial motifs and more. One of my heart’s dreams was to be an author, to publish a book and I can finally say that I have. It wasn’t at all what I had anticipated but I’m super proud of what I’ve created. I can only hope that others will be able to find some comfort and encouragement in the messages as they colour.
This therapeutic colouring book wouldn’t have been possible without careful study of Letter Styles Library by Liz Kohler Brown. My time with this book was inspiring and transformative, taking me back to childhood memories of crafting subject title pages for school notebooks and greeting cards by hand.
When it came time to testing the colouring pages, Ohuhu alcohol markers provided beautiful colour blends and the sensitivity of painting when using the brush tip ends. I really enjoyed testing the book with these markers. But keeping a bleed sheet underneath the page is crucial to keeping the next colouring page clean. Ohuhu does make a water-based odourless, no bleed marker, but I haven’t tested them yet. If you want to try them yourself, you can order them here.
I’ve included affiliate links to Amazon in this post, meaning if you decide to purchase any of the books or supplies I mention, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you which will help me be able to make more art.
