Funny how not that long ago coloring books were considered the exclusive domain of children. How times have changed. If you are the sort of adult who unwinds with a big box of Crayolas and pages of mandalas or outlines of Ryan Gosling, you owe a debt of gratitude to the McLoughlin Brothers and illustrator Kate Greenaway.
Their Little Folks’ Painting Book burst onto the scene in around 1879 with such fun-to-color outline engravings as “The Owl’s Advice,” “A Flower Fairy,” and “Little Miss Pride,” each accompanied by nursery rhymes and stories. The abundance of mob caps, pinafores, and breeches is of a piece with Greenaway’s enduring takes on nursery rhymes, though grown-up manual dexterity seems almost mandatory given the tiny patterns and other details.
Seeing as how there was no precedent, the publishers of the world’s first coloring book went ahead and filled in the frontispiece so that those tackling the other hundred drawings would know what to do. (Hint: Stay inside the lines and don’t get too creative with skin or hair color.)
Note: When you navigate to a specific coloring book within thecollection, you may initially encounter a blank section on the page. Please scroll down to locate the actual download link for the coloring book.
The free, downloadable adult coloring books that the New York Academy of Medicine solicits from museums and university and state libraries for its #ColorOurCollections celebration each February enliven our month far more than any Valentine or Presidents Day sale.
They’re not just a great way to while away winter’s last gasp. They’re also a wonderful portal for discovering cultural institutions that have thusfar flown beneath our radar, owing to size, geography, and/or field of study.
It’s up to each institution to determine what — and how much — to include.
Some color inside the lines by sticking to the subject for which they’re best known. Most take more of a mixed bag approach, flinging a variety of fascinating, unrelated images at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Some offerings are but a single page. Others will have you wearing your crayons to nubs.
With 101 participating organizations, it can be difficult to know where to start.
Maybe we can help…
Is medicine your thing?
If so, you’re in luck. By our reckoning, that’s the most popular subject, though it spans a broad range, from line drawings of flowering medicinal plants and a reproduction of a 1998 American Society of Anesthesiologists coloring book for pediatric patients, to flayed cadavers and harrowing surgical vignettes from centuries gone by.
It’s always a joy to see who’s behind the year’s freakiest image.
This year, our vote goes to the Bibliothèque Mazarine, France’s oldest public library, but feel free to put forth other candidates in the comments section
From the people who brought you the Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive comes an Illustrated Shakespeare Coloring Book–a coloring book featuring illustrations of 35 different Shakespeare plays. (All illustrations come from a nineteenth edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare.) The coloring book’s creator, Michael Goodman, tell us: “It’s obviously free to use and I hope in these days of home schooling parents might find it a simple way to engage their kids with Shakespeare.” Access the coloring book here.
You can find more free coloring books in the Relateds below.
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Unlike his devotee Stephen King, whose novels and stories have spawned more Lovecraftian film and television projects than any writer in the genre, H.P. Lovecraft himself has little cinema credit to his name. Given the abject terror evoked by Cthulhu and other terrifying “primal Great Ones”—as the author called his monsters in the story of the octopus-headed god—we might expect it to be otherwise.
But Lovecraft was not a cinematic writer, nor a fan of any such modern storytelling devices. He preferred the Victorian mode of indirect narration, his prose full of hearsay, reportage, bibliography, and lengthy description of experiences once or twice removed from the teller of the tale.
These qualities (and his extreme racism) make him a poor choice for the plot-driven medium of feature film. Lovecraft’s expansive imagination, like his buried, dreaming monsters, was subterranean and submarine, revealing only the barest glimpse of nightmares we are grateful never to see fully revealed.
The endlessly suggestive psychological terror of Lovecraft has instead become the source of an extended universe that includes fan fiction—written by professionals and amateurs alike—fantasy art, comic books, and RPGs (role-playing games) like the Call of Cthulhu series made by Chaosium, Inc. for over 35 years: “the foremost game of mystery and horror,” the company touts. “For those brave enough to uncover its secrets, the rewards are beyond comprehension!” If this sounds just like the thing to pass the time during these days of social distancing, look over all of the Chaosium Cthulhu offerings here.
For those who prefer Lovecraftian immersions of a more solitary, meditative nature, allow us to present Call of Cthulhu: The Coloring Book, the first of many “fun and engaging diversions,” the company promises “we can enjoy while staying in, working-from-home, in quarantine, or in self-isolation….. While away the hours in lockdown coloring an amazing array of scenes, with striking images from H.P. Lovecraft’s stories—and the Call of Cthulhu RPG his imagination inspired (Horror on the Orient Express, Masks of Nyarlathotep, The Fungi from Yuggoth and more).”
While these many Lovecraft spin-offs may be unfamiliar, hints of their harrowing scenes always lay in the murky depths of Lovecraft’s fiction. See how award-winning artist Andrey Fetisov has imagined these encounters with ancient terrors. Then color his Moebius-like drawings in, and enter your work in a Call of Cthulhu coloring competition by sharing it with the hashtag #homewithchaosium. There will be prizes, sure to be surprises, though we hope the ruthless Elder Gods don’t have a hand in choosing them. Download all 28 eldritch sceneshere.
There are many roads to wellness. Meditation, yoga, exercise, and healthy diet are all effective therapies for bringing down stress levels. But we shouldn’t discount an activity we once used to while hours away as children, and that adults by the millions have taken to in recent years. Coloring takes us out of ourselves, say experts like Doctor of Psychiatry Scott M. Bea, “it’s very much like a meditative exercise.” It relaxes our brain by focusing our attention and pushing distracting and disturbing thoughts to the margins. The low stakes make the activity easy and pleasurable, qualities grown-ups don’t get to ascribe to most of what they spend their time doing.
Reducing anxiety is all well and good, but some art and history lovers can’t accept just any old mass-market coloring book. Luckily, a consortium of overa hundred museums and libraries has given these special customers a reason to stick with it. Since 2016, the annual #ColorOurCollections campaign, led by the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM), has made available, for free, adult coloring books. The range of images offers something for everyone, from early modern illustrations like the cat at the top, from Edward Topsell’s Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607)—courtesy of Trinity Hall Cambridge; to the poignant cover of The Suffragist, below, from July 1919, a month after U.S. women won the right to the vote (from the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens).
There are, unsurprisingly, copious illustrations of medical procedures and anatomy, like that below from the Library at the University of Barcelona. There are vintage advertisements, “canoe-heavy content” from a Canadian museum, as Katherine Wu reports at Smithsonian, and war posters like that further down of Admiral Chester Nimitz asking for “the stuff” to hit “the spot,” i.e. Tokyo –from the Pritzker Military Museum. “The only commonality shared by the thousands of prints and drawings available on the NYAM website is their black-and-white appearance: The pages otherwise span just about every taste and illustrative predilection a coloring connoisseur could conjure.”
One Twitter fan pointed out that the initiative provides “a great way to get to know some of the collections held in libraries around the world.” Their enthusiasm is catching. But note that few of the institutions (see full collection here) have uploaded a large quantity of colorable images. Most of the “coloring books” consist of only a handful of pages, some only one or two. Taken altogether, however, the combined strength of one hundred institutions, over four years (see previous years at the links below), adds up to many hundreds of pages of coloring fun and relaxation. If that’s your thing, start here. If you don’t know if it’s your thing, #ColorOurCollections is a free (minus the cost of printer ink and paper), educational way to find out. Grab those crayons, oil pastels, colored pencils, etc. and calm down again the way you did when you were six years old.
One can only color so many floral-trimmed affirmations before one begins to crave something slightly more perverse. An emaciated, naked, anthropomorphized mandrake root, say or…
Since 2016, the Academy has made an annual practice of inviting other libraries, archives, and cultural institutions around the world to upload PDF coloring pages based on their collections for the public’s free download.
Those who need something more complex will appreciate the intricate maps of the Lithuanian Art Museum’s coloring book. Coloring Franz Hogenberg’s 1581 map of Vilnius is the emotional equivalent of walking the labyrinth for god knows how many hours.
As befits a content website-cum-digital-National-Library, the Memoria Chilena Coloring Book 2019 has something for every taste: flayed anatomical studies, 1940’s fashions, curious kitty cats, and a heaping helping of jesters.
You can now take part in the 2018 edition of #ColorOurCollections–a campaign where museums, libraries and other cultural institutions make available free coloring books, letting you color artwork from their collections and then share it on Twitter and other social media platforms. When sharing, use the hashtag #ColorOurCollections.
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