When you walk into the Hillsdale Community Library on the third Tuesday of any given month, you’ll find as many as a dozen teens and adults gathered around tables with cardstock coloring pages and colored pencils engaging in one of the latest fads: adult coloring.
The Color Café began more than a year ago under the direction of a former library staffer before Heidi Pruitt took over the program. The café was designed as an adult activity that was low-cost for the library and would give the town something to do during the cold winter months.
It meets from 6-7:30 p.m. on the third Tuesday of each month, and will meet next on March 15 in the meeting rooms adjacent to the library. Pruitt said she searches for free coloring printables and has a wide variety of options at each café, even the occasional bookmark. They also provide coffee, tea, and cocoa, and she often cooks baked goods for everyone to enjoy and puts a crackling fire on her laptop so patrons can color to the warm, crackling sound.
“It’s sort of nostalgic,” she said. “People come in saying, ‘Oh I loved to color!’ and now it’s okay to love coloring.”
Patrons can create art with colored pencils, crayons and a small selection of markers, but Pruitt said they are more than welcome to bring their own supplies. The café is open to teens and adults, and Pruitt said one mother-daughter team comes often because it’s a one-on-one activity for them to enjoy.
“It’s quiet and relaxing,” Pruitt said. “It’s a de-stresser.”
Sue Skiendziel said she attended the second color café ever in the fall of 2014.
“I wasn’t coloring at that point, but I’m kind of an introvert,” she said. “I was totally smitten by it.”
By Christmas she started buying markers, books, and pencils.
“It’s their fault I got into coloring. I’ve spent a lot of money,” Skiendziel said, with a laugh.
Skiendziel pointed out that the library was about five months ahead of a now-world-wide fad.
“The Hillsdale library was right with it,” Skiendziel said.
The New Yorker Magazine pinned down the “birth” of adult coloring books to when Johanna Basford, a Scottish artist who used to draw wine-bottle labels, published the “Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book” in 2013. In two years, it sold two million copies all over the world.
Before specially-designed coloring books, adult coloring was largely reserved for parents coloring with their kids or teenagers babysitting the neighbors. But largely due to Basford’s success, a new market opened up.
“We’ve never seen a phenomenon like it in our thirty years of publishing. We are on our fifteenth reprint of some of our titles. Just can’t keep them in print fast enough,” Lesley O’Mara, the managing director of British publishers Michael O’Mara Books, told the New Yorker in 2015.
Skiendziel said she is not very artistic, but has colored in art and thought, “Wow, that looks good.”
But more than being creative, the art of adult coloring is, in fact, therapeutic according to multiple studies.
In the 1900s, psychiatrist Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, prescribed coloring to his patients who suffered from anxiety, Fox News reported.
“Because it’s a centering activity, the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that is involved with our fear response, actually gets a bit, a little bit of a rest,” New York clinical psychologist Dr. Ben Michaelis told Fox News, “And it ultimately has a really calming effect over time.”
Skiendziel’s observation matches up with the scientific data about the benefits.
“It’s very relaxing,” she said. “I love the calm that it gives me.”
A few studies have shown how art therapy can positively affect patients.
A 2005 study published on PubMed tested the effectiveness of “mindfulness-based art therapy” on eleven women with cancer diagnoses against a control group who didn’t use the treatment. The treated women experienced “significant improvements in key aspects of health-related quality of life.”
A 2002 UK study discovered the benefits of art therapy in the classroom for children needing “emotional and behavioral support.” They left the 10-week Art Room program with “less depression, fewer behavioral problems and improved self-esteem,” Medical Daily reported.
But the simple act of coloring without a trained therapist isn’t technically “art therapy” according to the American Art Therapy Association. Art therapy also extends to more than simply coloring. The Association said they use “art media, the creative process, and the resulting artwork to explore their feelings, reconcile emotional conflicts, foster self-awareness, manage behavior and addictions, develop social skills, improve reality orientation, reduce anxiety, and increase self-esteem.”
But just because it isn’t therapy doesn’t discount the merits of a few hours of coloring at the Color Café.
A 2007 study found a correlation between music, drawing, meditation, reading, arts and crafts, and home repairs and enhanced “health and well-being.”
Although much of the “fad” might be anecdotal rather than proven science, many people in the Hillsdale community are discovering the benefits of adult coloring. During finals week last semester, Mossey Library held a coloring night in the Heritage Room for students needing to take a break from the books.
“It fills a creative need,” Skiendziel said. “I think we all need to do something creative. It’s very meditative.”