As someone with an Etsy shop, I get emails about ‘quitting your day job and living as a full-time creative.’ Since Etsy went public, the emails have changed. Now instead of just getting the community emails that focus on helping sellers build motivation, get organized and share stories, I get emails that are a curated selection of goods from shops, with a focus on what’s trending at the moment.



One of these emails had some colouring mandalas and I thought, I draw stuff like that. What an awesome thing to share.



My mother has been into drawing mandalas for years. Growing up she had kids in her community art classes start in the middle and work out, creating a story to go with the image. She took me to watch the Buddhist monks create a sand mandala, a sight one can be so blessed to behold in a lifetime.



My oldest boy just loves colouring. He’s devouring books at the moment. Try as I might to get him to develop his techniques for filling the sections with colour, he surges forward with an independent determination to discover the art of colouring at his own pace of exploration.



So time went on and I couldn’t shake the idea of creating a colouring sheet and then I went into a Chapters to pickup a new Moleskine notebook for writing my morning pages. BOOM! Apparently adult colouring books really were a thing, they were setup everywhere. The same stock of books is in every store, everywhere. Someone up on high decided that a serious colouring trend was going to happen this year. I decided that I had to put my hat in the ring and do something that took the whole concept to the next level. I had other things laid out to work on in the studio, stuff I’d been preparing to sink my teeth into for weeks, but everything was pushed aside. I got pulled into the process of working and reworking lines and building up layers and depth that could then be brought out further through the addition of colour. I started to imagine the results of someone putting themselves into the piece. Just imagine a show of ten full sized colouring sheets that have been brought to life through a diversity of creative voices.



The original intention was to create a silkscreen run of somewhere around 50 - 150 prints, but then I got into grey tones and the concept of a single screen floated away. The process of creating a series of screens for printing pushed the completion of the project beyond the near future and into the land of yet another dream to be realized at a later date. I then consider printing out my digital drawing in sections on the home printer, piecing it together and going through the process of hand transferring it through a graphite and velum process to a Strathmore 500 series bristol board, then inking it with a gradation of pens while reducing the run to just three hand created pieces. An ambitious imagination had once again pushed the project into the realm of a time frame that is currently beyond reach. Finally pragmatism kicked in and after much thought I resolved to approach a fine art printer and see about a smaller run. A commitment was made and now the prints have come to life.



Beyond the time expenditure of creating the work and investing in the belief that it was a cause worth pursuing, each print costs $174.30 to bring into the physical reality.



Why not just print up a whole bunch and get them made like posters? Who is going to buy a colouring sheet for more than $300?!



Posters are great, don’t get me wrong, but then it’s just a poster. The thing can cost less than a dollar a piece to print hundreds of them. Print on newsprint and it’s even cheaper and you can give it to even more people to play with, but then it’s just a cheap ubiquitous disposable good. Archival fine art materials are meant to last and preserve the artwork created upon them, the complete opposite concept of a sand mandala. Therein lies an interesting dichotomy, a meditative process focused on transcending but with the intention of creating of physical object that is meant to be preserved rather than washed away.



And with regards to who’s going to spend money on a colouring sheet, people looking for both an experience and a result. They’re out there. There are people who piss hundreds of dollars worth of alcohol down the drain by the end of an evening, blurring the sense of self and causing damage to the body in the process. Of course there are people in the world who would rather focus their minds through a meditative task that results in a work of wonder when completed.



There’s this feeling I has a hold of me, that the process of applying colour and texture deserves an elevated level of respect through an enriched quality of process and materials. Colouring is an art form that deserves to be given a foundation of respect. Hopefully this print run does that.











