Or not, depending on my mood
Our five-year-old middle granddaughter has recently started school, and the other day in class she drew a lovely portrait of me in crayon with bright orange hair – her mum asked why Nanny had such brightly coloured hair in her picture and her very serious response absolutely cracked us up:-
‘Nanny’s hair has to be bright because the school doesn’t have old people colours’
Oh dear! 🙂
When it comes to hobbies to help me relax in life, I enjoy walking, reading, crochet, and photography, but I must admit the pastime that feels most like play to me has to be colouring-in. Everything else can potentially be bracketed under ‘responsible adulting’ – walking is good for my health, reading broadens my mind, crochet creates a useful end product, and photography has a technical element and of course the end results can be kept for posterity to be shown and shared with others.
But colouring-in remains something left over from childhood that is done purely for fun, done for no other reason than because I enjoy it! It is not a means to an end but instead is an end in itself. I find I easily become absorbed in the process of choosing a medium and colours and designs, and apart from the few I photograph to share on my blog the majority of my completed colouring-in sits squirrelled away in closed books in a closed cupboard, effectively for my eyes only. It’s my secret stash of indulgent escapism, page upon page of playing just for the sake of it, and I absolutely love it 🙂
A selection of coloured-in circle designs from my archive for today’s Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Circle 🙂
I like using different colouring in techniques depending on the subject – usually I use coloured pencils for simpler designs made up of larger blocks of colour, and keep my finer-pointed gel pens for smaller, more fiddly designs. And sometimes I even mix and match both on the same page.
Today I’ve got a really bad headache so am sitting on the sofa resting, and I chose to stick to my coloured pencils and simple designs on an A4-size page to keep me company – and overall I’m happy enough with the finished results! 🙂
Some colouring-in designs are finicky and fiddly and complex to complete, while others (like this) are far more straightforward and simple – but whichever style you prefer, it always comprises basic outlines to be filled with the colours of your own choice 🙂
‘Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realise there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.’
Lao Tzu
I truly embrace the theoretical philosophy of life inherent in Buddhist ideology, but oh, how I struggle to fully imagine what it means in practice! ❤
Colouring in is such a great hobby to have at the moment, it takes time to do but time is in plentiful supply right now, so here is my latest effort, completed with gel pens 🙂
Sometimes I can’t decide whether to colour in using coloured pencils or gel pens, so I’ll combine both in the same design. I like the creative way the flat vibrancy of the gel pens complements the softer, more subtle shading tones of the coloured pencils 🙂
It’s funny how several things sometimes just come together seamlessly to create a blog post. Today’s Fandango’s One Word Challenge:Tribal merged in my mind with a quote I read on someone else’s blog the other day (apologies, can’t remember who!) that said:
‘Your vibe attracts your tribe’
And of course it’s the beginning of the month so we have a new Escapist Colouring Club link-up too.
So I decided this morning to create myself an A4 sized doodle quote page to colour in and share. Once I’d finished drawing my outline I was trying (rather unsuccessfully) to take a photograph of it before I started colouring it in, and my husband suggested scanning it and creating a cleaner digital copy instead – good idea!
I’m actually quite pleased with how it’s turned out 🙂
