When life gets stressful, coloring is one of the most therapeutic ways to take a step back and forget about impending deadlines, looming Christmas shopping, and laundry list of errands. But you don’t have to steal your daughter’s Frozen coloring book to relax—Crayola is making coloring an easy and beautiful experience for grown ups with its new Color Escapes Adult Coloring Kits.
Color Escapes come in four varieties: garden, kaleidoscope, geometric, and nature. I tried out the garden coloring kit (with my mom, because who better to de-stress with than your mom?) and the pages were all super detailed and beautiful. The two of us have been coloring together for years, but now we’ve found coloring pages that are a little more suited for our abilities than the standard ones we bought at the supermarket. I colored sunflowers with butterflies, and my mom did wildflowers with adorable little frogs all over them. The pages themselves are on thick, high quality card stock so the finished product (as long as you stay in the lines) is definitely frame worthy. The nature kit includes elephants, butterflies, and other creatures, while the kaleidoscope and geometric kits feature prints with intricate patterns. The kits themselves come with 12 11- by 17-inch coloring pages, a box of 50 Crayola colored pencils, and a box of 12 watercolor colored pencils.
What really makes Color Escapes special isn’t the pretty, poster quality result: it’s the coloring experience itself. It’s easy to get caught up in life’s everyday stresses, and it’s even easier to try to destress with our phones, TVs, and computers. While scrolling through a social media feed is certainly mindless, it can be stressful in its own right and not always what I need after taking a final exam or working all day. Coloring is a great way to take a step back and really remove any stressors, even if it’s just long enough to color in a few flowers or a crazy geometric pattern. Color Escapes allows you to concentrate on nothing more than staying in the lines, and allows your biggest worry to be which colored pencil to use next.
