I left behind the days of entertaining myself with coloring books and I never thought I would take up coloring as a hobby again. Sure, I have taken arts classes in school, even done some embossed paining and silk thread painting because they were mandatory. I have also hand made the occasional card for birthdays and thumb painted mugs as farewell gifts. But nothing for a long time. The most artsy thing I did since I started working was make a couple of 3D wood puzzles, several jigsaw puzzles and a lego R2D2. I love that one!
So, when I found myself in the Landmark store going over this new section called “De-stressing: Adult Coloring Books”, I have to say I was genuinely surprised. I wouldn’t have even thought that something like that could exist. But here they were, in all their glory, intricate coloring books of different styles and themes ranging from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter. All meant for adults.
One stack of books that particularly caught my attention was “Querkles“. It had a picture of Marilyn Monroe looking like a thumb painting. On examining it closely, I realized that the entire picture was made of overlapping circles and colored so masterfully with different colors and shades that they made a whole face appear out of circles.
Although intrigued, I left the store empty handed that day, not sure about the whole coloring for adults thing. It sounded just a little bit ridiculous, don’t you think? But I ended up returning the very next day to buy that book because I just couldn’t get it out of my head. I came back home and proceeded to spend the rest of my weekend filling one of the twenty faces that it contained. It took sometime between 7 to 8 hours to finish one picture and it was such a unique experience. I felt like a kid again. I had forgotten the amount of concentration a good coloring book can require off of you.
I rediscovered my love for the childhood hobby of coloring.
The difference between Querkles and any other coloring book is that, you can only use 5 colors and you don’t choose what parts to colour. They are chosen for you. Now, they can either be 5 different colors or 5 shades of the same colour or even the same colour with 5 different coloring styles from solid colors to checkers to only lines. The entire page is filled with overlapping circles and the areas to be colored have numbers on them – 1 through 5. It’s all very organized and simple mistakes don’t really spoil the whole picture.
I am proud to say that I have completed about 3.5 faces till now and still going strong. I decided to do Monroe as my second one. Here is a step by step reproduction of what it looked like after each coloring phase was complete.
I find Querkles to be an amazing way to improve my concentration and relax my mind at the same time. And the result is so beautiful that you always have something to show for your time and effort.
