Color Me Mindful – Underwater by Anastasia Catris

Color Me Mindful: Underwater was the first “grown up” coloring book that I bought.  I always loved to color when I was little (and I found myself coloring in my daughters’ coloring books all the time), so when I saw the new coloring craze that was going on, I decided to get in on it.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that coloring relieves stress and anxiety, and as someone who suffers from severe anxiety and panic attacks, I’m always looking for ways to help with it.  Even if it didn’t really help calm me down, I knew that I would still enjoy it, so I bought myself a coloring book and some colored pencils and started coloring when I got home.

Let me just say, not only does coloring help relieve stress, it helps keep you calm even after you’ve finished coloring.  It really helped me relax, and I find myself going back to it at least once a day, sometimes several times (and I’ve lost track of a lot of time this way!), and it never gets boring.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Color Me Mindful: Underwater.  There are quite a few pictures in this book, and each of them are nicely detailed without being so detailed that it becomes more of a chore to color than a fun activity. 

Here are some of the pictures that I’ve colored in this book so far.  There are more, but I’m just posting a few:

I colored all of these using the 50 pack of Crayola colored pencils, and I found that they worked really well.  Since I have kids, I couldn’t see paying a whole bunch of money for the higher end colored pencils, because let’s face it – art supplies and kids.  It’s only a matter of time before they are no longer my own, anyway.  Still, I’m happy with how they turned out.

The pages in this book are relatively thin, so I don’t know if markers would work out too well.  If you did decide to try out markers in this one, I would recommend slipping a plain sheet of paper between the pages, because they are printed on both sides.  Otherwise, you would probably wind up ruining some of the pages.  Also, I noticed the pages have a tendency to curl up a bit after coloring.  I’ve seen someone noted that this happened when they used markers, but it happened to me while using colored pencils, too.  It isn’t a real problem or anything for me, but I just wanted to point that out.

The only real thing I found myself disliking about this book is the number of two-page scenes.  Because of how the book is printed, it makes it a little difficult to completely color the pictures when they span across two pages – it’s difficult to color anything near the spine of the book.

Still, I’m really happy with this coloring book, and I know I’ll be spending countless more hours helping myself de-stress by making pretty pictures.