I love adult coloring! Coloring has brought some much needed balance and relaxation into my life.
I worked as a Human Resources executive in the mining industry in Australia. I was very “career oriented”. What that really means is that I was consumed by my job. I made very little time for anything else in my life. My job was very demanding and for me work always came first. I had some family responsibilities and I always made sure that these were “fitted in” around my job. This meant of course, that I had no balance in my life and made no time for any destressing or relaxation. I had no hobbies or even simple ways of relaxing. Over the years the stress of being so career focused built up. I was very tense, surviving on very little sleep and generally turning into a “not so nice to be around” person.
In July 2015, I was going through a particularly stressful time at work and I remember being inside a Newsagency and seeing a display shelf with a sign saying “Coloring In for Stress Relief – Adult Coloring Books”. I was in a hurry (as always) so I didn’t stop or do anything more about it. Over the next few weeks the thought of this “Adult Coloring” thing kept popping into my head. Something really appealed to me about the potential for relaxation through something as simple as coloring in. So, one Saturday afternoon I bought a set of cheap coloring pencils at the local discount shop and a couple of Adult Coloring Books from KMart and I began coloring in.
I haven’t looked back since. I love it. I found the action of coloring in did indeed help me to relax and clear my mind of the stressful and anxious thoughts I was experiencing about work. Coloring helped me to focus my thoughts and I started to question the lifestyle I had been living and to re-evaluate what was really important to me. I have a wonderful husband, two great adult step children and two and a half grandchildren (we are expecting the 3rd later this year 🙂 ), a beautiful little dog and two gorgeous cats. I wanted to enjoy my time with them and to become a more relaxed and well-rounded person.
I am truly blessed to have the most amazing husband who has supported me through all the stress of my career. We were in the very fortunate position of being able to both give up working full time and so we have now “retired”. I am now feeling much more relaxed, spending time with my family and friends and really enjoying being able to explore the world of adult coloring. I feel as if a whole new world has opened up for me as I experiment with different pictures, techniques and coloring tools (pens, pencils, markers, etc).
I am no talented artist! I spent most of my life working in a very “left brain” career with engineers. In my world, we’re not generally known for our creativity 🙂 . The world I’ve come from is very practical and down to earth, analytical, structured, often “black and white” with not too many shades of grey. More mathematical than artistic. One of the things I enjoy about adult coloring is that it gives me an outlet to safely explore the hidden creative side of me. I’m not very artistic, I don’t draw or paint and my sense of putting colours together isn’t well developed. None of that matters in adult coloring. There are no rules. If I want to color my tree trunks pink and my leaves purple with orange spots, the sky bright red, I can! That is a really freeing thought.
When I started coloring, I didn’t know anything about colored pencils, pens, techniques or art in general. I wanted to find out more and so I started to search for information on the internet. There is definitely information out there but it is in many different places. I would really have appreciated one site where I could go to find out something about all the aspects of adult coloring. I tried looking for reviews on different colored pencils, pens, markers, books. I wanted to learn different techniques for improving my coloring skills. I have found some of these things exist. For example, there are hundreds of YouTube videos on different coloring techniques, etc. Some of these videos are excellent, others didn’t necessarily provide the answers I was looking for. So I decided it would be useful to have a website that provided information and links to all of the great things out there related to Adult Coloring.
As I couldn’t find it all in one place, my husband and I decided to build our own website TheColoringInn.com that aims to bring information together for anyone who wants to quickly find things out about Adult Coloring. A hub of adult coloring information, if you will. The aim of the website is to provide information about all aspects of Adult Coloring as well as providing links to the helpful videos and sites already out there. If you can’t find it on this site, then you should at least be able to find a link that quickly and easily points you in the right direction.
If you’re interested in finding out more about adult coloring or you have found yourself addicted to this hobby then TheColoringInn.com is for you. Please sign up for our newsletter where we’ll keep you up to date on the many tools, techniques, useful videos, etc arriving in the adult coloring world.
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Happy coloring!
Suzy
xxx