Jesus Calling Adult Coloring Book – A Review

Jesus Calling Adult Coloring Book: Creative Coloring & Hand Lettering By Sarah Young

I was quite excited to try out this book as adult coloring has become the ‘it thing’. Also, I was given Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling devotional, so I knew the author and was excited to see how she took parts of her work and added them to a coloring book.  The book is large, being 10″ x 10″, with pages that are perforated and can be torn out.  Each page contains very detailed drawings of God’s creation, and or a phrase or statement from Jesus Calling.  There is a basic introduction and guide on how to use the book at the front and a practice page at the end of the book to work on lettering. The drawings are elegant and intricate enough to hold meticulous colorers, as well as having plenty of pages with larger spaces to color. Some pages have the sayings outlined for filling in, while others are shaded to practice lettering.

The book is quite elegant with metallic coloring on the cover. The feel alone of the book is lovely.  The introduction and practice pages left me a little confused as to how I am specifically supposed to do lettering, and I haven’t taken the time to look online.  The pages take colored pencil well, though I would say that just plain Crayola colored pencils are actually easier to use than my Prismacolor pencils. The Prismacolor pencils tend to ‘grab’ the page and create a drag that make it harder to color. Crayola is slicker and dryer; less oily.

My attempts at the lettering stopped the minute my fountain pen ink bled through the page. I have a light hand with fountain pen ink, so I figured it would work like a marker. Personally, I would be afraid to try markers or watercolor paints for fear it would bleed through.

While every page is perforated so that it can be torn out, a spread seems to coincide with each other, so if you tore it out, then you lose the aesthetic of the saying with the image. Maybe I’m too picky about this. Maybe most people wouldn’t want to frame these and they use them more for meditation, but I have a bit of an OCD thing where I like things to match up. Also, due to the page size, I’m not sure you could ever frame it. Though I could see a charming display tacked up to the wall. Very country-esque.

All in all, I would probably give this book a 3 out of 5 stars. The biggest complaint being the bleedthrough, which a lot of adult coloring books seem to have.  As well as losing pages due to the dual sided quotes on pages.

Kate

Listening To Bob Dylan

American folk and rock singer Bob Dylan, who was born on the 24th of may in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. — Image by © 91040/dpa/Corbis

Recently I have taken to liking Bob Dylan and his music. Not all of it, but a select few. I find it funny since I used to inwardly scoff at his music. Possibly because he was popular during the Vietnam War. Why that should make any difference at all doesn’t make any sense since I particularly like music from the 60s and 70s. Maybe it’s because I can actually appreciate the story being told in one of his many songs, whereas before, I was more interested in the beat. I didn’t know how connected to stories in songs I would get over the years of writing.

The first song I remember being introduced to was ‘Lay, Lady, Lay‘, and at the time I didn’t even know it was Dylan. But I fell in love with it. Over the years I’ve slowly added to my small collection of his songs. The stories in all of them are magical and as a writer, I can appreciate the condensed tale told.  I actually wonder if contemporary folk music appeals to the writer in us due to the story being told? I can honestly say that country music that has a story, I do have to quantify it, appeals to me. I like songs without a story, in fact, most of what I listen to wouldn’t qualify as much of a story and more of a ‘feeling’.  But if I start really thinking about songs that grab and hold me, they tell a story.

Thinking about Bob Dylan always reminds me of something I read in Poemcrazy where Susan Wooldridge was talking about him carrying around an armload of words. Turns out, it wasn’t Bob Dylan she was talking about, but Dylan Thomas, the poet. While I have a book of his poetry, I’m not as familiar with his works, so somehow I thought it was  Bob Dylan. While I had the person wrong, I still picture Bob Dylan carrying around armloads of words, racing to get to his black typewriter, up winding stairs in a small garret at an Irish inn on dreary, wet Irish days.

The actual quote about Dylan Thomas from Poemcrazy is as follows:

Dylan Thomas loved the words he heard and saw around him in Wales. “When I experience anything,” he once said, “I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing.” Writing one ballad, he said, was like carrying around an armload of words to a table upstairs and wondering if he’d get there in time.

My image is certainly fanciful at best in regards to Bob Dylan. Who knows if he used a typewriter or wrote his music in Ireland.  I know I’m probably completely wrong, but if you listen to his words you feel the lyrical quality, and I can’t help but imagine the songwriter is this way. In Ireland. Go figure.

I carry boatloads of words in my head constantly. I have lost countless poems or starts of poems by not having paper at hand when I need it. I have a small pocket journal I have just for this reason, but like my camera when I don’t have it I need it and when I do have it I don’t need it, my writing is the same way. I never write when I have paper at hand. I write when I am scrambling frantically for any scrap piece of paper at hand. Netflix flyers, bill envelopes, receipts, margins of something and various other odd places. I have a folder/envelope of scraps of paper with the starts of poems. I have been meaning to transcribe them onto a document, or into one notebook, but I have yet to sit down and do anything with it. The question of, ‘Will I ever really use that and do I need to compile it all down?’ frequently hits my mind.

There is a panic that starts when I can’t find paper. I try to repeat the lines over and over in my head in the hopes that I will remember it for the next five minutes till I find paper, but inevitably I am asked a question, interrupted or just don’t have a moment to grab a paper and pencil.  It’s aggravating like that itch you can’t scratch. Knowing that the lines were just there. If only there was a way to scoop all those words up in a bucket that holds onto them until you can come back to collect them.

I try to make sure I keep a notebook, journal or index card with me whenever I go out. Of course, because I have that ready, I rarely write out in public.

In no particular order, Bob Dylan songs I currently love are, Lay, Lady, Lay, The Girl From The North Country, Mr. Tamborine Man, To Fall in Love With You, and Shelter From The Storm.

My one Dylan Thomas poem I currently keep rereading due to a friend’s young wife having cancer and is recovering from a stroke, is Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.