So. The kids are in bed and you have a spare half hour. Or maybe you’re a frazzled banker trying to de-frazzle, or you’re retired with plenty of spare hours. How do you fill them? No, cynical people, the answer is not “Watching Gogglebox while getting stuck into a bottle of wine”. For increasing numbers of us, the answer is an adult colouring-in book.
This is largely the fault of a 32-year-old Scottish woman called Johanna Basford. She published her first, Secret Garden, in 2013, when there was no dedicated section on Amazon for adult colouring books. Today they’ve got thousands of them, Waterstones reports a year-on-year sales increase of more than 1,000 per cent and Basford has been called a cross between Karren Brady and Emma Bridgewater.
“I wouldn’t be offended by that,” she smiles.
Nor is it just Brits. Secret Garden had an initial print-run of 16,000, but has sold nearly seven million copies worldwide, including three million in China in less than three months and more than a million in Brazil. An adult colouring book is, as I write, second only to Jamie Oliver’s latest on Amazon’s bestseller list and there are four of them in the top 20. What on earth is going on?
It’s simple, says Basford: “It’s an analogue activity. You’re not plugged in, or looking at your iPad. You’re not distracted by BuzzFeed and Twitter. It’s a chance to unplug and have a digital detox.” Plus, she thinks, there is a certain nostalgia to it: the last time most people coloured anything in they didn’t have a job or a mortgage and life was simpler.
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“I think everybody has a creative spark in them, but a blank sheet of paper can be daunting,” she explains. “A colouring book is a good way to be creative without getting upset, or having to invest lots of money in easels and classes.”
They are now such big business that before the publishers would let me see her latest book, Lost Ocean, I had to sign a long legal document swearing me to secrecy, which seems a little excessive. Guys: it’s a colouring book. What am I going to tell people? That there’s an octopus on page 34 and I’m going to colour it purple?
Apart from a brief and unhappy spell in London, Basford has lived in Scotland all her life. “I’m not inspired by concrete or the urban lifestyle,” she says. “Selfishly, I just create books that I love. I wouldn’t want to draw a cityscape or architecture.”
The daughter of two marine biologists, Basford was brought up on a fish farm. Today she lives in a converted barn in rural Aberdeenshire, which she shares with her husband, James Watt, the co-founder of the BrewDog brewery, and their 18-month-old daughter, Evie. She thinks the creative gene comes from her grandmother, who loved drawing and crafting and embroidery. From the moment she could hold a crayon, Basford had no doubt that holding crayons was all she ever wanted to do. She drew on anything, including the walls, which her mother seems to have taken surprisingly well.
Eventually, she wound up at art college in Dundee, where she specialised in printing: not illustration, because the illustration department was in the basement while the printing department was a light-filled top-floor studio with views of the River Tay. She realised that while everyone else was creating multicoloured artwork on computers, she was drawn to silk-screen printing by hand. She also realised that working in black and white was cheapest. The die was cast for a career spent working by hand in black and white.
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“I was really skint, so to compensate for the lack of colour I’d do really intricate artwork,” she remembers. “So that’s how it started: frustration with digital and a lack of funds.”
On graduating, she started designing bespoke hand-printed wallpaper, but hated the manufacturing process: “I would get orders and my heart would sink. I got one to do a castle in Sweden and I cried.”
Somewhat to her relief, the recession put paid to the expensive wallpaper market. The credit crunch, she says, became her saviour. She sold her printing equipment and embarked on a second career in freelance illustration, designing branding and packaging for everyone from Nike and Absolut Vodka to the Scottish parliament.
All the while, in her spare time, she was working on an adult colouring book, using the same black-and-white, intricately drawn technique she’d honed at college. So when a publisher called and asked if she would do a children’s colouring book, she had her answer: “I said I’d love to do a colouring book, but I want to do one for grown-ups.”
How did that go down?
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“They were a bit tentative,” she admits. “Even I’m massively surprised by how successful it’s been. I think this is just the start of us doing more personal and handcrafted things. Every time someone picks up a pencil and colours in, that’s one less person looking at an iPad. I think that’s really heart-warming.”
Besides, she says, she doesn’t really make colouring books, she makes lots of self-contained images that happen to be in a colouring book. She likes adding an element of the treasure hunt, too — hidden objects scattered through the pages that users have to find — and has discovered that people like the pictures to be seriously detailed.
The process is resolutely old-school. Basford draws in pencil on pages of A2 or A3 paper. When she’s happy, she goes over it in ink, and only then does she tweak it on the computer “which is usually erasing bits where I’ve spilt a cup of tea, or the dog sneezed under my desk and my pen went crazy”.
A single drawing can take her up to three days, but the idea of drawing on a computer is anathema: “It’s so artificial, there’s no soul to the lines. I love the slightly imperfect circle. That’s what gives my drawings charm. I was never trying to sell a lot of books or get a second book deal. People ask me why my books sell, and I honestly think it’s because they’re made with love.”
Lost Ocean by Johanna Basford is published by Virgin Books priced £12.99
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You can download and print your own copies of Johanna’s illustrations using the below links:
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