Johannesburg - Before you start thinking colouring-in books for adults are so last year, consider this - eight of the top 20 sellers on Amazon last year were those type of books.
Still.
Marketed as a meditation technique, stress-buster and/or way to explore your artistic side without becoming stressed about just how good you are on the creativity meter, colouring-in books for adults have been around a long time. But social media helped along an explosion about two years ago when Johanna Basford was commissioned by publishing house Laurence King to create Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book.
Since then, Basford has also created Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest and Colouring Book and Lost Ocean: An Inky Adventure and Colouring Book, to be found in the craft section shelves at a bookshop near you. The paper is thick, the designs are intricate and the price is just out there.
Seems like the hot trend in adult entertainment of the paper variety is still with us. But there are signs that it is morphing. No surprise that there are apps like Pigment, Colorfy, Colorme, Momi Colouring and many others popping up.
No surprise either that you can now get a Moleskine notebook with Basford's doodles on every other page, to be coloured in or not.
It is a bit of a surprise, though, to see how South Africans have clambered aboard the bandwagon. Local publishers Human & Rousseau picked up Michael O'Mara's The Creative Colouring Book for Grown-Ups, which has been flying off the shelves under the Afrikaans title of Kreatiewe Inkleurboek vir Grootmense.
There are books with mandalas, animals and urban scenes, and if you know where to look, you can find ones filled with tattoos, skulls and even swear words.
Metz Press have gone a step further and commissioned local artist Monique Day-Wilde to create Daydreams: Wings and Daydreams: Garden - hand-drawn designs featuring local fauna and flora - with the added bonus of smaller size. These A5-sized books are meant to be tossed in your handbag and taken out when you have a moment. One design per page, thick paper, intricate designs, all of which speak to the thought that has gone into the process.
Then there's Tanya O'Connor's My Koebaai, Stres!-Joernaal. Strand-based artist/writer O'Connor has produced Kom Kleur In! and Sharing Moments. The third one she was commissioned to do was aimed at cancer survivors and their loved ones.
"I didn't write in that one because I couldn't say what needed to be said, but there was space to write and I tried to create pictures that were empowering," she said.
This led to the stress journal (which O'Connor is contemplating doing in English as well), which is meant "to encourage people to write about feelings", particularly through the drawings, which are accompanied by descriptions of specific emotions, plus space to write your own thoughts.
O'Connor says she has deliberately included mistakes in some of the sketches in order to encourage people "to fix it with creativity".
The foreword is by psychologist Dr ST Potgieter, who says the book encourages people to listen to themselves.
O'Connor says: "Self-help books are littered with 'you must' but I will tell people you can try this".
"Most of the books on the market are computer-generated and translated. Mine are South African pictures."
The Star