Page 28 - Advertising Annual 55

BUSINESS
Color Me Creative
Artist Andrea Pippins embraces hair in all its diversity in her coloring book I Love My Hair: A Coloring Book of Braids, Coils and Doodle Dos (left). Fascinated by the natural world, illustrator Millie Marotta says she creates intricate patterns and textures to keep colorists entertained, such as this page from her book Tropical World: A Coloring Book Adventure (right).
Claire Sykes
Remember what you created with crayons in your childhood? Those waxy sticks in hand, you’d fill in thick-lined drawings of your favorite cartoon characters.
Welcome back, coloring books—this time, for adults. Tens of millions of them have been sold in the United States and around the world since the 2013 release of Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford’s Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book, her first of three. “It’s the single book that created the adult coloring phenomenon, tapping into a market no one knew existed before,” says Laurence King, her publisher at Laurence King Publishing (LKP) in London. Initially promoted to older children, Secret Garden attracted mainly adults, from all walks of life, who quickly found coloring to be meditative, stress relieving and fun. And it’s an enormous market for illustrators to tap into.
From nature scenes and cityscapes to mandalas and mathemati- cal designs and even hairstyles, coloring-book subjects run the gamut, with spinoffs in calendars, notecards, postcards and journals. Along with the grown-up themes, the details make them appealing to adults.
Focusing, yet calming, coloring provides a playful escape from
a demanding, digitalized life, back to the carefree days of childhood. It’s also creative (without the blank-paper panic), given the variety of pencils, pens and markers, colors, and techniques, including shading and layering.
Basford thinks of her books as collaboration; she draws the lines and other people add the color. Fans upload their renditions online in a vibrant, ever-growing gallery. On Basford’s Facebook page, colorists offer their gratitude: “Definitely relieves my stress as a stay-at-home mom”; “I find it very relaxing, and I escape into my own world with coloring pencils.” After Basford announced new book releases on her Facebook page, one enthusiast wrote: “I’m screaming with excitement like I’m at a Michael Jackson concert!!!!”
Basford’s client work led directly to her lucrative business. For years, she had been doing intricate black-and-white pencil and pen illustrations, which she then scanned and further embellished, for commercial clients. To promote her work, she offered free desktop wallpapers, and they caught the eye of LKP.
Secret Garden, which includes mazes and patterns to complete and spaces to fill, was inspired by the botanical books Basford inherited from her grandfather, head gardener at Scotland’s Brodick Castle, Garden and Country Park, which she visited as a child. Its surrounding woods made their way into her second book, Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest & Coloring Book (LKP, 2015). She thanks her marine-biologist parents for the visual ideas in Lost Ocean: An Inky Adventure & Coloring Book (Penguin Books, 2015). The three books add up to more than fifteen million copies sold to date, plus her journals and postcards.
Making space for creativity
Colorists can find more nature images in Millie Marotta’s books,
28 Illustration Annual 2016