Today though I will be nice again. Here is another little essay about the past and how I was shaped into who and what I am by decades of life and influences that began when I was very young.
Coloring—Lines
Optional?
Along with the magic of the written
word, the idea of coloring pictures and patterns has been a big part of my life
since very early childhood. The ritual of reading me a bedtime story—or very
often some bedtime verses-- goes back to my earliest memories. I had a couple
of favorite books. One was A Child’s
Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. I loved those poems! Actually I
still do. The other, perhaps even more
favored for a reason I will explain in a moment, was a big book of Mother Goose Rhymes.
The neat
thing about it was that almost every page had a line drawing to illustrate one
of the verses. They featured women in
the “Gibson Girl” styles and children in turn of the century garb (19th, not
20th) and cartoonish creatures that were really not at all ridiculous. Part of
the ritual was watching mom or dad color one of those drawings. My dad always
had a good set of colored pencils. Though not an engineer, he did do a lot of
schematics and laid out plans for many of his projects. For a long time I could
not do the actual coloring but it was fun to watch a drawing somehow come to
life with colors.
Before long
I had crayons and coloring books of my own. At first I did not do a very neat
job but my coordination quickly improved and I learned to stay inside the
lines, at least most of the time. Before
I reached my teens I was doing a lot of drawing myself and also making paper
dolls, a hobby that I kept for many years. I had been started on this activity by
one of my few baby sitters. I later grew dissatisfied with the “Kewpie doll”
figures she had made and learned to draw girls and guys in proper eight heads high
proportions and designed clothes for them, colored of course!
At one time
I wanted to be a dress designer, especially of the flashy “western” styles
popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This later fell by the wayside as I
made other career choices but I did learn to sew and could combine pattern
pieces to change styles. I always drew and colored a planned garment before I
made it.
Even as an
adult I would occasionally color a picture in one of the kids’ or grandkids’
color books and began to wish there were some mare sophisticated line drawing
books for grown ups. Lo and behold, I finally found some. Most of them were
made by a firm called Dover Books that did a lot of reprints of ancient books
and classics. I am not sure where or why they began to do color books but they
did. There were flowers, animals, ethnic and native costumes and geometric
patterns. After I got some of them, I decided
colored pencils were often too pale and began to use felt tip markers which
came in increasing ranges of colors.
After my
husband passed away, I spent many hours coloring some books I found that had
Mandela patterns. There was something comforting about both the designs and
choosing the right colors—at last what seemed right to me—to fill them in. There
were still not a lot of grown up level coloring books around, though, and it
seemed that even those for children were falling out of the vogue, replaced by
stickers and other paper crafts and then all the electronic things.
The last
few years this has changed! I now see coloring books everywhere. Not a gadget
and gizmo catalog comes to my mailbox that does not have color books in it,
many with a set of colored pencils. I look askance at them still, but perhaps
they are better than the kiddy quality I tried and discarded. Good artist
quality pencils are far from cheap so I still mostly stick with the ‘magic
marker’ style felt tipped pens. The worst thing about them is they tend to
bleed through but fortunately the books I use are normally only patterned on
one side of the pages.
Now I have
to laugh when I go on Facebook and Pinterest and find that a cousin and many
friends and acquaintances are now coloring. They all seem to feel they have
discovered something marvelous and new. I do not laugh at them but at myself
for being either ahead of or behind the times which seems to be a family trait.
All of us seem to start too soon or too late and miss the perfect timing that
brings success and recognition.
I have also
used the ‘Paint” program on Windows (computer graphics) and created designs
there. I stumbled almost by serendipity onto some basic patterns like zigzags,
Greek key, stepped pyramids and such which can be combined to make designs that
look very much like Navajo and other native rug patterns. I have a whole bunch
of these now and have even used them on my website and some of my promotional
material since my sig line for awhile was “romancing the southwest in tales of
love and adventure,” with a gecko for my
totem creature. Two of those designs appear above.
Although I will never be an artist, I do enjoy playing with
colors and patterns and sometimes taking liberties with where the hues go, in
or out of the assigned lines… After all,
I can often be found shoving smoke or herding cats, figuratively speaking that
is. What is the fun of only doing easy, current faddish kinds of things? Be a leader even if no one follows!
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