Coloring book
Encyclopedia
Book
A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of hot lava, paper, parchment, or other materials, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf or leaflet, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
containing line art for a reader to add color
Color
Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
using crayon
Crayon
A crayon is a stick of colored wax, charcoal, chalk, or other materials used for writing, coloring, drawing, and other methods of illustration. A crayon made of oiled chalk is called an oil pastel; when made of pigment with a dry binder, it is simply a pastel; both are popular media for color...
s, colored pencil
Pencil
A pencil is a writing implement or art medium usually constructed of a narrow, solid pigment core inside a protective casing. The case prevents the core from breaking, and also from marking the user’s hand during use....
s, marker pen
Marker pen
thumb|MarkerA marker pen, marking pen, felt-tip pen, flow or marker, is a pen which has its own ink-source, and usually a tip made of a porous, pressed fibres; such as felt or nylon.-Permanent marker:...
s, paint
Paint
Paint is any liquid, liquefiable, or mastic composition which after application to a substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film. One may also consider the digital mimicry thereof...
or other artistic media. Coloring books are generally used by child
Child
Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority...
ren, though coloring books for adults are also available.
History
Paint books and coloring books emerged in the United States as part of the "democratization of art" process, inspired by a series of lectures by British artist Joshua ReynoldsJoshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA was an influential 18th-century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy...
, and the works of Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer who exemplified Romanticism in his approach....
and his student Friedrich Fröbel. Many educators concluded that all, regardless of background, students stood to benefit from art education
Art education
Art education is the area of learning that is based upon the visual, tangible arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings...
as a means of enhancing their conceptual understanding of the tangible, developing their cognitive abilities, and improving skills that would be useful in finding a profession, as well as for the children's spiritual edification. The McLoughlin Brothers
McLoughlin Brothers
McLoughlin Bros., Inc. was a New York publishing firm active between 1828 and 1920. The company was a pioneer in color printing technologies in children's books. The company specialized in retellings or bowdlerizations of classic stories for children. The artistic and commercial roots of the...
are credited as the inventors of the coloring book, when, in the 1880s, they produced The Little Folks' Painting Book, in collaboration with Kate Greenaway
Kate Greenaway
Catherine Greenaway , known as Kate Greenaway, was an English children's book illustrator and writer, who spent much of her childhood at Rolleston, Nottinghamshire. She studied at what is now the Royal College of Art in London, which at that time had a separate section for women, and was headed by...
. They continued to publish coloring books until the 1920s, when the McLoughlin Brothers became part of the Milton Bradley Company
Milton Bradley Company
The Milton Bradley Company is an American game company established by Milton Bradley in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1860. In 1920, it absorbed the game production of McLoughlin Brothers, formerly the largest game manufacturer in the United States, and in 1987, it purchased Selchow and Righter,...
.
Another pioneer in the genre was Richard F. Outcault
Richard F. Outcault
Richard Felton Outcault was an American comic strip writer-artist. He was the creator of the series The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown, and he is considered the inventor of the modern comic strip.-Early life:...
. He authored Buster's Paint Book in 1907, featuring the character of Buster Brown
Buster Brown
Buster Brown was a comic strip character created in 1902 by Richard Felton Outcault who was known for his association with the Brown Shoe Company. This mischievous young boy was loosely based on a boy near Outcault's home in Flushing, New York...
, which he had invented in 1902. It was published by the Stokes Company. This launched a trend to use coloring books to advertise a wide variety of products, including coffee
Coffee
Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark,init brooo acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,...
and piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
s. Until the 1930s, books were designed with the intent for them to be painted instead of colored. Even when crayon
Crayon
A crayon is a stick of colored wax, charcoal, chalk, or other materials used for writing, coloring, drawing, and other methods of illustration. A crayon made of oiled chalk is called an oil pastel; when made of pigment with a dry binder, it is simply a pastel; both are popular media for color...
s came into wide use in the '30s, books were still designed so that they could be painted or colored.
Educational uses
As a predominately non-verbal medium, coloring books have seen wide application in education where the target groups do not speak and understand the primary language of instruction or communication. Examples of this include the use of coloring books in GuatemalaGuatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
to teach children about "hieroglyphs and Mayan
Maya civilization
The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period The Maya is a Mesoamerican...
artist patterns", and the production of coloring books to educate the children of farm workers about "the pathway by which agricultural pesticides are transferred from work to home." Coloring books are also said to help to motivate students' understanding of concepts that they would otherwise be uninterested in.
Since the 1980s, several publishers have also produced educational coloring books intended for studying graduate-level topics such as anatomy and physiology, where color-coding of many detailed diagrams are used as a learning aid.
There is also a reputedly excellent textbook on the Fortran
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
, called A Fortran Coloring Book, that is presented as a tongue-in-cheek coloring book.
Health and therapeutic uses
Coloring books have seen wide application in the health professions as educational tools. One nurse, trying to limit the trauma of child surgery, described in an academic publication how the use of a coloring book "might help [the child] to understand what was going to happen to him." They are used in rehabilitation of accident victims to aid recovery of hand-eye coordination, and they are used with autistic children both for entertainment and for their soothing affect. It should be noted however that some autistic children will react strongly to bright colors, and that the use of paint and paint-brushes can lead to accidents that may greatly upset the child. For this reason a software based coloring book may be a better option.Political uses
Coloring books have sometimes been used for political ends. In 1968 the Black Panther Coloring Book began circulating in the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. The book, which featured black men and children killing pigs dressed as police officers, was not actually made by the Black Panther Party
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party wasan African-American revolutionary leftist organization. It was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982....
, instead being made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
's COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.COINTELPRO tactics included discrediting targets through psychological...
program to discredit the organization.
The term and concept of the "coloring book" was adopted by the feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
artist Tee Corinne
Tee Corinne
Tee Corine was a lesbian visual artist notable for the portrayal of sexuality in her artwork.-Early life and education:Corinne was born and grew up in Florida. Her mother introduced her to principles and techniques for making visual art...
as a tool of female empowerment. Corinne made pencil sketches of female genitalia, which she then inked and printed on card stock. She published a collection of them in 1975 as The Cunt Coloring Book.
Printed coloring books
Perforation
A perforation is a small hole in a thin material or web. There is usually more than one perforation in an organized fashion, where all of the holes are called a perforation...
s so their pages can be removed from the books and used as individual sheets. Others may include a story
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
line and so are intended to be left intact. Today many children's coloring books feature popular cartoon character
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
s. They are often used as promotional materials for animated motion picture
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
s. Coloring books may also incorporate other activities such as Connect the dots
Connect the dots
Connect the dots, also known as dot to dot or join the dots is a form of puzzle containing a sequence of numbered dots. When a line is drawn connecting the dots the outline of an object is revealed. The puzzles often contain simple line art to enhance the image created or to assist in rendering a...
, maze
Maze
A maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage through which the solver must find a route. In everyday speech, both maze and labyrinth denote a complex and confusing series of pathways, but technically the maze is distinguished from the labyrinth, as the labyrinth has a single...
s and other puzzle
Puzzle
A puzzle is a problem or enigma that tests the ingenuity of the solver. In a basic puzzle, one is intended to put together pieces in a logical way in order to come up with the desired solution...
s. Some Coloring Books also incorporate the use of stickers.