With midterm season in full swing, you can almost feel the stress in the air. For me, my weeks started to go in a loop of waking up, going to class, eating lunch and dinner, studying, and then sleeping.
This cycle led to me rotting in bed all weekend and then stressing about more upcoming exams and projects on Sundays, which left me neglecting all my favorite hobbies. However, this pattern was broken with the most unexpected thing: a coloring book.
One night, I was watching a movie and one of my friends came to join, but she brought her coloring book and markers. Instantly feeling left out, I went to get a coloring book from my room that was given to me as a gift. As soon as I started the page, I was immediately swept up, and I felt a level of calmness I haven’t felt in weeks. So, here’s your ultimate guide on how to get into coloring and how it can help you with de-stressing.
Why Should You Get A Coloring Book?
As someone who loves a good arts & crafts project, a coloring book was something I was never initially drawn to. Over time, I realized that there was something about it that genuinely helped me relax.
It was mostly caused by the order and simplicity of the coloring pages because there’s no way to mess it up. If you color outside the lines, you can either cover it easily or extend the design past the line. With other crafts, especially painting, you can make mistakes and cause even more stress, whereas coloring leaves very little room for mistakes.
A coloring book gives you unlimited freedom to add any color you want. If you have a color combo that you want to experiment with, a coloring page is the perfect place to try it out, or if you just want to see more of your own personal favorite color, it’s so easy to customize the page to what you want it to look like.
This level of control can help when dealing with stress. It’s something you can put your time into and know that it will look the way you wanted it to. There’s no sense of not knowing what the outcome will be because you are one in control. Both these feelings make coloring books feel like a cozy hobby because it’s simple, with very little time commitment, and yet allows you to have full reign over how you want your page to be decorated.
Other art projects can take hours to finish or must match the original idea as closely as possible, but the unlimited creativity and layout of coloring books eliminate those problems. The end product leaves you with a page that took a couple of minutes and includes some of your favorite colors, which is honestly more fulfilling since you made it into what you wanted.
How Do You Get Into Coloring?
My biggest piece of advice is to go to any store, and you will find a coloring book. The first place that comes to mind is Target, but you can easily get one at Five Below, Barnes & Noble, or even at the checkout lane at Publix. If a store sells books, there’s a good chance that they will be selling some kind of coloring book.
Also, pick a coloring book with a fun theme; there’s about a million different themes that range from cute, cozy animals to Marvel comic covers, so pick one that sounds the most fun to you.
Tools of creation
Once you have your coloring book picked out, you’ll need your coloring utensil. Now this is where things can take alternate routes. The two most common coloring utensils are colored pencils and markers, but it doesn’t end there. The search can go even further if we get into what type of markers work best. To keep it simple, I would recommend different tools for different coloring books.
From my experience, colored pencils work best on more detailed coloring books because you can color in between smaller spaces, and the colors will blend more easily to add more depth to your page.
On the other hand, markers work better for more simplistic pages because the colors pop out more and they fill in the major spaces of the page. Make sure that if you get markers, they don’t bleed through the page because some of the alcohol markers will bleed and ruin the next page.
Now that you have your supplies, you can set up a calming workspace and begin. You can put on a movie or music to help set a calming vibe, get comfy with a blanket and PJs, and just relax with each marker or pencil stroke.
Let go of your daily stresses and let the color on the page redirect your attention to just filling in a gap on a page. Redirecting your attention into something else will help you to relax and enter an unmatched flow state that will have you completing five pages in two hours.
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