MUSING #34 - Reflective Coloring

MUSE: my reflective coloring book. 

MUSING: 

I have been thinking about this idea for a while. It started by making a coloring book for my nephew’s Birthday. I traced picture of him from the previous year, and strung the images together with a fun rhyme about the year he’d had. I wasn’t with him for his actual birthday, so I sent it via email to his parents and they simply printed out the PDF. It turned out so well that my sister printing extras out to put in frames and hang out his wall. I decided to do it for his following birthday, then I started doing it for friends. Not entire books, but one or a few pages with images of them and cute imaginative little add ones. For my brother’s birthday I recreated a picture of his husband and him coming down the aisle after they were married... and I added owls popping around the page edges because my brother loves owls! 

Then this Christmas, I felt moved to make two coloring pages that also had prompts on them. One to list different positive things from the past year (favorite new song, best tv show watched, etc) with an abstract design to color in. The other was of a willow tree with space below it’s branches to write out a gratitude list. I felt particularly pleased with the Gratitude Tree, and felt I’d stumbled upon something... a guide to encourage someone to focus on gratitude while bringing color to a beautiful and calming image. And so the idea came to me - I want to make a reflective coloring book. Such books exist, but I believe more so in the act of coloring the calming and sometimes repetitive images. I’ve never stumbled upon one that also provides thoughts pieces and prompts. And if there are such books out there, I bet they are helping a lot of people! And I’d like to be part of that. 

I sat on the idea for many months, but never stepped forward into the planning mode. I considered using the Gratitude Tree, but I couldn’t decide on the theme and style of the whole piece. I knew it wouldn’t get done unless I felt committed to the idea and held accountable, so I put it on my list of goals for my current Momentum workshop, Leadership Training. I declared that I would create and distribute the reflective coloring book, with poetry (a little add in I put last minute, because I am more a writer than drawer at heart), to the Momentum community by June 15. So I thought on it, and I thought some more, but nothing was coming in the first couple weeks of this commitment. Until this last week. 

I made a decision to bring in a Momentum lesson that encourages putting one’s ‘way of being’ first, before action and result. That one can choose to be empowering, joyful, grateful and many other positives ways first and that state of being will positively shift their actions and outcome. It’s a mind before matter kinda thinking. So I was considering (I was being open and creative) to how I could incorporate this as I went for a walk in the woods. And finally the idea starting coming together with nature: all these positive ways of being can be found in nature. In the stream, the wind, the animals! And then I honed in on the animals, and after a good brainstorm, and some experimental drawing sessions, I decided I’ll be making a series of coloring pages for the vermont animals of the woods. Kind of like Spirit Animals, and each page will be accompanied with a poem that highlights the attribute of that animal. And at some point, either between the pages or at the end, there will be prompts to help the reader/drawer consider which animal and attributes they connect with, or strive to be, or see in others. I don’t know yet but it’d definitely coming together!