I love coloring. I always have. I recently decided that I wanted to color, gosh darnit, and so I would get some coloring books and colored pencils.
Since I live in a rural area, I can’t get coloring books at local stores. When I looked on Amazon, everything I found was $10-$15 bucks (in yen… I was buying from JP Amazon, but whatever). I balked a bit at that, but the desire to color was strong and I bit the bullet. Thankfully, it turns out that all of these books are well worth the price.
So Many Books
Of course I am not the only adult who enjoys coloring. I was surprised, however, to discover just how rich an adult coloring industry exists. Apparently coloring is touted as an alternative to meditation and otherwise a theraputic activity, good for dealing with stress. So it turns out there are a lot of great, complex coloring books out there and all four of these are fantastic.
I have only dug into the one book so far. That first page really made me want to color it right away. It had so many fine details that coloring it took all of my free time for four days straight. I got caught up on a lot of YouTube backlogs while working on it. xD The other Japanesey book now lives in my bookbag. Unfortunately, carrying a tin of 36 colored pencils around has not proven a great idea.
Traveling in Color
I’ve ordered a better carrying case, one that rolls up, and what appears to be a good handheld pencil sharpener. It has good reviews online, at least, between this listing and a more expensive listing for the same thing, but with a leather carrying case. The pencil sharpener I got for use at home is this one; if you look at the bottom picture on the product page, it has a really good internal mechanism. It’s just like the pencil sharpener I grew up using at home, which lasted forever and worked really well. I was super excited when I saw that picture.
What I didn’t expect is that the pencil sharpener is designed to hold the pencil in place for you; the faceplate pulls out and keeps the pencil from wobbling, reducing the chance of the tip breaking off. It’s really high quality and didn’t cost a lot. Yay!
Three years later update (April 21, 2019): It seemed high quality at the time, but the faceplate that held the pencils in place broke after not much use. The way the sharpener was designed meant it became a lot harder to use after that.
Star Wars Books
As for the Star Wars coloring books, I dunno when I will get to them. None of the other coloring pages have taken me so much time as that first one. (It helps that I’m leaving white space.) I’m still happy just trucking along on that first coloring book, though. It’s designed to be easy to open flat and I’m kinda lazy, which makes it more attractive. xD
The Force Awakening book has a lot of fun double-page spreads like the one pictured above. It strikes a pretty good mix of realistic and fun in general. Because of that, though, it’s harder to decide how I want to color things. I’m torn between coloring all the BB-8s like the real deal and doing an Andy Warhol style psychedelic color extravaganza.
The other Star Wars coloring book, though, is just incredible. A lot of the pages are mandalas made of things like X-wings and Jar Jar head outlines. It also has full page portraits, however, of characters surrounded by abstract, kinda-floral-but-not-really flair. Additionally, there are double-page spreads of droid heads repeated over and over, packed like a wall of sardine cans.
I felt like I was taking a risk buying this book online because there was no internal preview. Between the cost of the three other coloring books and getting a second HDD, though, I figured I was already blowing a bunch of money, so why not. 10/10, would risk again. This book makes me so very happy, even just flipping through pages.