Nothing in the world makes me feel more like a kid again than the smell of a pack of crayons and a big blank coloring book full of possibilities. Now that I’m mostly grown up I’ve finally created a coloring book, not only for kids but also for the inner child in everyone. I would go wildly outside the lines, straight over the lines, and, occasionally, right off the page and entirely onto the table! New rule from Mom: Don’t color the table. I was a creative kid and my coloring was in abstract overdrive. Get the color on the paper was the only goal I had in mind. My young, little brain was thinking way too fast for my tiny hands to keep up. I was much more interested in watching colors appear on the paper as I scribbled willy-nilly. Along with being the first rule I learned, it was also the first one that I simply had to break. The first real rule I was taught as a child was Color inside the lines. Rules can sometimes be rigid and confining, and have a “delightful” habit of taking the wind out of your creative sails.
For a time, life was grand, right up until I learned about the so-called rules. I felt as though some wizard had just given me a whole rainbow with which to color magical worlds in whatever way I wanted. The Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz must have suddenly made a lot more sense to those who’d only seen it on black-and-white TVs prior! Maybe those viewers felt a little like I did when I got my first set of markers. I can just imagine what people thought when the first color TV was introduced all those years ago, watching the formerly black and white world come to life with color.