wherein Liz has fun with coloring books

[edenfalling]

I ran out of sewing projects (or more accurately, I ran out of patience for sewing projects), so I have started using coloring books as the focus aid that lets me actually listen to podcasts instead of losing concentration about two minutes in.

I'm currently working through a set of geometric stained glass patterns, from a book by an A. G. Smith. I've finished seven and have seven still to go, which is at least three hours of listening time. Then I have a proper paper coloring book -- also geometric patterns -- which I think will be a colored pencil task rather than a marker task.

Anyway, I am going to share the colored pictures with the internet so I don't feel quite so much like I've been wasting my time with them. *wry*


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As you can see, I got a little better about even color application over time. (Also, I uploaded these to imgur rather than to tumblr, which means that the links should remain stable instead of breaking the next time tumblr staff decide to 'upgrade' their site.)

Comments

[edenfalling]

Well, I purchased a bunch of art supplies over the past few years because of a Homestuck story I have... uh... not been writing lately, so I am well-supplied with coloring materials. I might buy another book, though, because geometric patterns (much as I love them) do get old after a while, and if I could find something with, say, art nouveau plants, that would be great fun to work with.

I respect others' right to color as they please, but coloring outside the lines is one of the things that makes my soul wince. I like being tidy. :-)

[autumnia]

You should check out "Secret Garden", by Johanna Basford which started the recent craze. I think my office had one of her more recent coloring books in the free pile at one time and now I'm regretting that I didn't pick it up.

I'm a neatnik when coloring... I can't stand it when people go outside the lines and always want to reach for an eraser when I see it happening. :-)

[edenfalling]

That is very pretty! But it looks a little too intricate and fussy for my purposes, since I am using coloring as a focus aid rather than an activity in and of itself. Relatively large and simple 'blocks' of area-to-color let me occupy my hands and eyes while leaving my actual attention on whatever I'm listening to.

(If I don't have a nonverbal hand-and-eye activity, I cannot focus on audio-only input worth beans. I drift off after maybe five minutes maximum, and retain very little from the experience since most of my attention is fixed on trying to pay attention instead of on the actual content of the audio.)

[marmota_b]

I'm becoming a little worried about our similarities. I'm the same way about listening to audio!
Once upon a time, I was in the habit of taking a graph paper and scribbling in geometric patterns similar to your colouring pages, and then filling them in with colour. It was often something I did at school when the lessons became rather tedious (such as when the teacher was repeating something I already knew). The fun part was that sometimes, I could use those patterns for further creative pursuits.

[edenfalling]

Heh. Geometric patterns were one of my habitual note-taking doodles, back when I was regularly listening to lectures. I'd draw an eight-by-eight grid of squares, and then divide the squares into black and white triangles to create symmetrical patterns. Sometimes when I was particularly bored, I'd tile one pattern all the way across a page. I did this mostly freehand on standard notepaper, but occasionally in math class I'd use graph paper.

[marmota_b]

I think my friend did that more often; I was in the habit of having graph paper at hand, myself. There was also a lot of little flowers and dogs and stuff like that, sometimes even very sophisticated pictures. And we exchanged doodles, or one of us would start something and the other would finish it.
Somehow, I even managed to occasionally write a story under the table one year. Nowadays, I have no idea how I managed that. I could use more of that ability to squeeze in some writing!