Coloring between the Lines

There are coloring books of all sorts for adults. I know several people who spend joyous hours creating this type of art with colored pencils and crayons. It seemed like perhaps a fun thing I would like to do while watching television, because, heaven knows, I can’t do just one thing at a time. At AT&T we were trained how to overlap, which today is called multitasking. 

Well, turns out that for me they weren’t fun. They were frustrating.  It took a while to figure out why.

I no longer want to color in between the lines.  Or if I do manage to stay inside the lines, I want them to go away when I’ve finished the picture and just be left with what I put on the page.

As someone who never thought of herself as creative until age 45 I’ve learned to thrive outside the lines.  Early in my life I would have described myself as expressive and able to interpret other people’s art.  After all I was a pianist, singer, a secret writer, and performer. At the piano I was concerned more with sound and interpretation than with technique and precision. Luckily technique came easily and I was always close enough on the precision to get by.

It wasn’t until I took a workshop on creativity (a daring move in itself) and heard part of the facilitator’s definition was ‘the ability to connect one thing to another’ that I started thinking that perhaps I could be called creative after all. Now I want to be creative all over the place and have been blessed with the ability to do so even at work.  I’ve taken classes in colored pencil, nature printing, acrylics, making paper, mosaics, and just last month, Chinese brush painting. Often my projects are ‘interesting’ and get packed away in the closet.  I’ve even been known to toss out a few while some hang on my walls.  A couple of art forms have become a passion. All have made me see nature in particular in a new way. All have expanded my world.

Until these darn coloring books.  I even turned off the TV to concentrate on the picture on the page.  Didn’t work.

I’ve decided that maybe I should tear out a page and use tracing paper to lightly transfer the pieces of the picture that I want onto a different sheet. The traced lines can be erased and I’ll be free to interpret, be expressive, and as creative as I want to be.

This thinking also made me wonder what lines are in other areas of my life and where they might be fencing me in rather than fostering creativity and growth. Now that I’ve ranted about coloring books and art, I think I’ll do a little musing about these other boundaries and encourage you to do the same.

Marilyn