Jenny Keane's favourite colours are pink, orange and red. But she's using a fancy pencil set with fancy names, so selects Prussian Blue to start colouring in a swirling black-and-white picture of dots, love hearts and psychedelic tentacles.
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From her tin of 12 pencils comes Mineral Green, Imperial Purple and the rather lovely Crimson Lake, too. Keane offers me a cup of tea while I watch her work at her bright white kitchen table. She's a 31-year-old digital marketer with blonde hair, pink lips and bright red toenails, who enjoys colouring abstract patterns each week in her fourth-storey apartment in Glebe, while builders erect another residential behemoth across the road.
"Colouring in takes me away from all the chaos that's going on around me," she says. "I can focus on one thing and lose myself, almost like meditation."
She's a grown-up who likes to colour in and she's not alone, with more adults adopting an activity traditionally consigned to childhood. Sales of adult colouring books – along with books of intricate dot-to-dot drawings and doodles – are increasing in Australia and abroad, as people take up coloured pencils, pens and crayons to ease stress and spark creativity.
Some grown-ups gather for "colouring circles" with friends at cafes and in one another's homes. In France, adult colouring-in titles reportedly outsell cooking books. Adult colouring-in books were the top two bestsellers on Amazon last week – at No 1 was Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book, which has sold more than 1.4 million copies worldwide and been translated into 22 languages.
Keane started colouring in at university, as a reprieve from the stress of studying. She enjoys colouring once a week for about an hour at a time – any longer and she gets hand cramps, the legacy of being a cheerleader while living in the United States.
She waits until her husband Bill gets home from work so they might sit together, quietly completing their respective colouring-in books. His favourite colours are green, orange and yellow."During the week some people like to go to the bar to decompress, whereas my husband and I like to sit down together and just colour," Keane says.
"I can't draw but I like to use my hands to get creative. Some people might use yoga or running but colouring for me is my sense of peace."
The promotion of colouring as a self-help activity has boosted sales of titles such as Colour Me Happy and Colour Therapy: An Anti-stress Colouring Book. Other recent titles include Colour Me Good Ryan Gosling and Colouring for Grown-Ups: The Adult Activity Book, which includes a self-portrait from "before you abandoned all your hopes and dreams".
Jayde Leeder, 35, who runs a stationery shop on Sydney's northern beaches, prefers colouring mandalas - circular designs with concentric shapes, which were promoted as a relaxation tool by psychologist Carl Jung. Her two young children - aged two and eight - have their own colouring books. "It's nice to do it with the kids but you tend to put more focus on what they're doing," she says. "If you take 10 minutes out to have a little colouring in for yourself, it's something for you personally.
"It makes me focus on one thing rather than being a mum and running a business and having so many things in my brain."
Her own mother also enjoys colouring, she says. "It just takes you back to when you were younger, when life was easier and more relaxed and you didn't have to worry about paying the bills."
But unlike most children, Leeder likes staying in the lines. " It's nice to have a couple of things in my life that are structured and organised."
Secret Garden author Johanna Basford - whose new book Enchanted Garden: An Inky Quest & Colouring Book has sold out in some Sydney stores – says drawing and colouring helps her "unplug" from the distractions of the digital world. "Colouring offers a welcome opportunity to allow yourself to be completely immersed in a task, without the constant chatter of Twitter or the lure of Facebook."
A 2012 study in the United States found colouring in reduced anxiety among university psychology students. Other studies have shown choice of colour can reveal your mood, from intense reds to calm blues. Art therapist Claire Edwards, from the University of Queensland, says colouring in is a form of mindfulness, which focuses people on a specific activity rather than on any sources of anxiety.
There is something inherently relaxing in a repetitive activity that encourages people to be still and focused, she says. Staying in the lines can give people a sense of control and mastery over their life, she adds.
Edwards has contributed an illustration to the forthcoming colouring-in book The Breathing to a New Beat Technicolour Dream Book, which will raise money for the Heart and Lung Transplant Trust Victoria. Adult colouring-in books are part of a broader movement back to "old-school activities", she says. "People appreciate doing something that is quite simple and basic. We can just sit down with a drawing and focus on that and everything else can fall away for a while."
