An exciting new arrival is now on the shelves at The Realm of Toys in Williams Lake.
The ABCs of Mythology Coloring Book for adults was created by artist and store owner Jazmyn Douillard with her friend Ingrid Glaw to help fill the growing demand for the relaxing activity of colouring for adults.
“The book is co-drawn with Ingrid Glaw, who is an artist I met in Kelowna,” Douillard explained.
“She now lives in Winnipeg and we visit each other every summer. We decided to get together and do a colouring book: something we wanted to do years ago.
“This was a good time to do it, the colouring book craze being what it is, and because we’re fairly quick illustrators we figure it wouldn’t hurt to get on the band wagon.”
She said they went through the alphabet and said the first things that came to mind that they’d enjoy drawing, and wrote their names beside the letters. In the end, she said, they had divided the alphabet exactly fifty-fifty.
“Throughout the process we did end up switching a few things around,” she added.
Asked about the current adult colouring fad, she said in the 1970s her mom had a colouring book meant for adults. “It was quite large; I think ours was Fantasy Worlds. As a kid I loved it: it had full details and every page had a little snippet about the story,” she explained.
“I always thought how cool it would be for this to come back. And then it did. I remember walking into a Chapters and seeing a whole wall of colouring books for adults, but they were all repeating images like mandalas or flowers. There were no pictures. I really wanted to see full scenes again.
“Then it became a full-blown fad and we wanted to introduce something a little different.”
It isn’t just the colouring books that are different from the ones for children. Douillard said that adults colour with different tools.
“What the people who are really into this are buying are the massive pencil crayon sets. And gel pens; you can get them in sets of 100 or 200. They’re thick: you can’t really shade with them so you have to get really creative with your colours. People absolutely love them,” she said.
“For a high school-type set of about 60 pencil crayons you can pay about $25, but if you go into the higher end Prismacolor sets you can pay $20 for six of them. And if you’re going for bigger sets you’ll pay $60 to $100.
“For the 250th anniversary Faber-Castell set you pay $1,500.”
Douillard researched adult colouring preferences before putting the book together.
“When we started this project I went on Facebook and joined a whole bunch of colouring groups to see what people like and what people are doing. Of all the groups, the one I’m the most active with is Colouring for Chronic Pain,” she continued.
“It’s a huge group of people with serious pain and medical issues, who are in the hospital all the time, messaging from their beds. They’re colouring to take their mind off the pain. This is hundreds and hundreds of people. A lot of people with depression or stress issues get into colouring,” she said. “It’s a mindless, happy activity.”
ABCs of Mythology Coloring Book, designed and put together by Douillard, was printed by Create Space and is expected in the store in the next two weeks.
The Realm of Toys, co-owned by Jazmyn and her mother, Joan Douilllard, is located at 35 First Avenue.
People can follow them on Facebook or reach them at 250-392-7079.