National Coloring Book Day: A Publisher’s Perspective on the Art Form

I have published 20 coloring books. Most have been retired, but the Belly Dancer series remains in print because those books represent something most coloring books do not: real people translated into art.

The Belly Dancer Coloring Books were created by having artists sketch from my photographs of actual dancers. The illustrations are not generic figures pulled from stock poses. They are real women performing real choreography, captured in photographs and then translated into line art that colorists bring to life with their own choices. That process, photography to sketch to coloring page, gives the books an authenticity that pure illustration cannot replicate.

National Coloring Book Day is August 2nd. For most people it is a chance to pick up colored pencils and relax. For me it is a reminder that coloring books are a legitimate publishing format with a real audience and real creative challenges.

A Brief History of Coloring Books

The concept dates to 1880 when the McLoughlin Brothers published The Little Folks’ Painting Book, simple line drawings intended for children. For over a century, coloring books remained children’s educational tools, teaching colors, shapes, motor skills, and basic concepts through interactive pages.

The format changed dramatically in 2015 when Johanna Basford published Secret Garden, an intricate adult coloring book marketed as art therapy. It topped bestseller lists worldwide and redefined who coloring books were for. Suddenly adults were buying coloring books by the millions, and publishers scrambled to fill the demand.

That wave is what led me to publish my own. I saw an opportunity to create something different from the mandala patterns and botanical illustrations flooding the market. The Belly Dancer series came from my photography work, which gave me source material nobody else had. Real dancers, real movement, real artistry translated into a format that invited colorists to participate in the art.

Why Adults Color

The adult coloring book trend was not a fad. It persists because it addresses something screens cannot: tactile, focused, meditative engagement with a physical object.

Coloring requires just enough attention to occupy the mind without demanding complex decision-making. The rhythmic action of selecting colors and filling spaces produces a mental state similar to meditation. Attention is absorbed in the present moment. The constant low-level anxiety of digital life fades because coloring is analog, physical, and finite. You are filling a page, not scrolling through an infinite feed.

The therapeutic benefits are documented. Reduced stress, improved focus, better sleep quality, and a sense of accomplishment from completing a tangible piece of art. These are not trivial outcomes in a world where most people spend their days producing intangible digital work that disappears into servers.

For writers specifically, coloring serves a creative function beyond relaxation. It engages the visual and spatial parts of the brain that prose writing does not. After hours of working with words, switching to a purely visual creative activity can reset the mind in ways that passive entertainment like watching television cannot. It is active without being verbal, creative without being linguistic. That combination makes it an effective recovery tool for writers who have depleted their word-processing capacity for the day.

Coloring Books in Education

The educational value of coloring books for children is well established. They develop fine motor skills, color recognition, spatial awareness, and concentration. Teachers integrate them into curricula because coloring transforms abstract concepts into interactive experiences. A child coloring a map learns geography differently than a child reading about it.

Subject-specific coloring books extend this principle. Marine biology coloring books, historical figure coloring books, anatomy coloring books, and mathematics coloring books all leverage the same mechanism: active engagement with visual material produces deeper retention than passive reading.

This principle applies to adult learning as well. Medical students have used anatomy coloring books for decades because the act of coloring structures reinforces spatial relationships in ways that textbook illustrations alone do not. The coloring book as educational tool is not a children’s concept. It is a learning concept that happens to have started with children.

Creating Coloring Books: The Publisher’s Side

Publishing coloring books taught me things about visual storytelling that prose publishing does not. Every page has to work as both an uncolored line drawing and as a finished colored piece. The line work has to be interesting enough to attract a colorist and structured enough to guide their choices without constraining them.

The Belly Dancer series added a layer of complexity. The source photographs captured movement, fabric flow, and body positions that had to survive translation into simplified line art. Too much detail and the coloring page becomes frustrating. Too little and the dancer loses her identity. The artists I worked with had to find the balance between photographic accuracy and coloring book accessibility.

Paper quality matters more than most publishers realize. Coloring books used with markers bleed through thin paper. Books used with colored pencils need tooth to hold pigment. The physical production decisions affect the colorist’s experience as directly as the illustrations do.

I retired most of my coloring books because the market became saturated and I chose to focus my publishing energy on the writing handbooks and fiction at masterofworlds.com. The Belly Dancer volumes remain because they represent the best of what I produced in that format, and because the source photography gives them a quality that generic illustration cannot match.

The Belly Dancer Coloring Books

The four volumes currently in print:

• Belly Dancer Coloring Book Volume 1
• Belly Dancer Coloring Book Volume 2
• Belly Dancer Coloring Book Volume 3
• Belly Dancer Coloring Book Volume 4

Each volume features real dancers sketched from photographs. The illustrations capture authentic choreography, costume detail, and the physicality of belly dance performance. These are not stylized fantasy figures. They are portraits of real artists in motion, translated into a format that invites colorists to complete the art.

National Coloring Book Day FAQ