The adult colouring books craze

In the current flurry of shiny big-ticket releases, Indian indie artists are joining the genre

New brand-name releases and Harikumar’s independent book, Beauty needs space.

Indu Harikumar, writer and artist, photographed at her home in Navi Mumbai on February 27, 2016. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

In August last year, Indu Harikumar, a Mumbai-based artist, self-published 200 copies of a colouring book for adults titled Beauty Needs Space: A Colouring Book For Big Children. In an interview to the Bangalore Mirror at the time, the 36-year-old artist had said, “I don’t think Indian publishers will do this.” Her limited edition book, however, became an instant favourite with those who chanced upon it. It was filled with detailed sketches of a girl with free flowing hair, floating over gardens filled with flowers and clouds. The idea struck when she was told to disregard her body image issues. “Beauty needs space,” she was told. Word of mouth, and ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ of the first few pages that she put out on Facebook ensured that her book became an important milestone in the adult colouring book trend in India. 

Ever since Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford’s “mission to make the world a happier and more creative place through colouring” her pages in Secret Garden, her 2013 book that gained the adult colouring books worldwide popularity, the trend has started making much noise in India with Indian arms of international publishing houses keen to make the most of it. While Penguin Random House has worked in collaboration with design house Good Earth to soon publish Bhag-e-Bahar: A Mughal Garden, it is also publishing colouring books as companion volumes to Devdutt Pattanaik’s popular booksJaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata and Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana. Hundred full page illustrations selected from these books will come out asThe Jaya Colouring BookandThe Sita Colouring Book, respectively. “It feels nice that my illustrations will be acknowledged and enhanced for their own merit,” says Pattanaik, the mythologist-author-illustrator whose sketches are known for their simplicity of lines. In the meantime, Simon and Schuster has recently brought Insight Editions’Harry Potter Colouring Book and Harry Potter Magical Creatures Colouring Book into the country.

Page 7 (Lion of Lannister) of The Official A Game of Thrones Colouring Book, George RR Martin, published by Harper Voyager. Credit: Tomislav Tomić; and cover of Penguin Random House & Good Earth’s colouring book Bagh-e-Bahar. Courtesy: Penguin Random House

At a personal level too, editors such as Karthika V.K., Chief Editor of HarperCollins India, are very excited by this phenomenon. “I love it. It gives me this joyous sense of accomplishment, as though some long unused part of my brain has suddenly come alive,” she says, capturing in one happy-coloured stroke what psychologists and many colouring book addicts attribute the success of the trend to.

But it’s not just the “colourers” who get a sense of fulfilment through colour-in projects. Evidently, this is true for artists too. After she released Beauty Needs Space in 2015, Harikumar started receiving tweets from colour-happy grown-ups, which she says made her feel connected to her audience. Then they started sending her photos of coloured-in pages from her book. “I had never thought of the black-and-white sketches in my project as unfinished endeavours, to begin with. But seeing my creations become a medium where I can invite others to add to it…it feels like my art has grown from just being informed by my own ideas and limited experiences, to being enriched by someone else’s ideas,” she says. 

This is especially relevant given the surge in publishers adapting movie and book franchises into colouring books. The stress-busting pitch is now only a starting point. “When you are working with a Game of Thrones [colouring book], you are working with your understanding of the genre itself, as well as with your own personal history of engagement with the characters. In that sense you are not working with a blank canvas any more, as you were when just filling [colour into] patterns,” says Karthika, whose publishing house has released the colouring book adaption of the TV series A Game of Thrones, and will this May publish The Art of Romance: Mills and Boons, which will feature sketches of the series’ most memorable book covers.

A page from Beauty Needs Space, coloured in by Anika Naeem. Courtesy: Naeem and Harikumar.

Bengaluru-based independent artist Alicia Souza agrees with Karthika. “Uncoloured does not mean incomplete,” she says. Souza, who once worked with popular design start-up Chumbak, now freelances and has set up an online store of her own quirky products. “From a product point of view, the colour-in book is a complete product, but one that also serves its purpose,” she says. 

Harikumar experienced the magic of this “purpose” when Mauritius-based Anika Naeem stumbled upon her book at a friend’s house and fell head-first in love with it. “Indu is from India. And I am originally from Pakistan. And although her designs are not really ‘Indian’ per say, I felt like I wanted an Indian-Pakistani art piece…” says Naeem, a student of educational psychology, a trained chef and current owner of a sushi café in the island-country. After colouring the intricate illustrations in Beauty Needs Space, Naeem penned in, between the illustrations’ narrow lines, the Urdu verses of Muhammad Iqbal, a poet-barrister in British India regarded by many as the “spiritual father of Pakistan”. “The verses are my Pakistani addition to the drawings,” Naeem says. Harikumar’s first reaction when she received a photo of Naeem’s finished page was surprise: “I didn’t even know there was enough space for that!”

The colour-in trend in the country may branch out into interesting independent projects. While Harikumar sees great scope for Indian folk art-based projects which “will lend itself very well to colouring books”, Souza’s first colour-in project, for instance, was started on a whim. The idea came to her, as all great ideas do, during a long, hot shower one autumn evening two years ago. Called the Grateful Calendar, the project is made of 365 illustrations of everyday things that make your life better—things you easily forget about in the humdrum of everyday hurries. Like a hot shower, obviously. Or even your trusty old beat-up car. Each day, you get to spend time with one such thing and colour into an illustration of it. Her latest is another calendar: theLet Gocalendar, which will remind you to jettison three small everyday negativities each month. If you had the calendar right now in March, you would be colouring into a cartoon of a dog-and-cat couple. The thing you have to let go of is doodled right underneath them: “Idea of a Perfect Partner”.

A picture of March, from Alicia Souza’s Colour-in and Let Go calendar. Courtesy: Alicia Souza

“I guess it can be seen as childish,” says 24-year-old Masters student of neuroscience, Sahana Srinivasan, who currently owns theLet Go calendar. “But I know that people my age are really confused between being a stressed-out adult and a carefree kid. So an adult colouring book feels like a happy middle ground,” she says.

Both Souza and Harikumar say that they have been approached by several publishing houses. But in the meantime, Aleph will in August publish illustrator Sujaya Batra’s Meditations of the Prophet, based on verses from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran, and Prabha Mallya’s Fangs and Feathers that take you away to India’s mountains, jungles, and rivers with illustrations of the creatures that live there. 

In the meantime, Harikumar is working on a true-to-the-term “adult” colouring book— one that’s based on the Kama Sutra. She is researching her illustrations thoroughly, she says, so as to not fall into the heteronormative trap.

 

This piece was first published here.