Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for July 15, 2015

Apparently, Janis doesn’t speak irony.

In college I had a girl friend that liked to color. She was one of the smartest woman I’ve known, but she had a little girl side to her. It turns out coloring is very therapeutic… Of course doing anything with a beautiful woman is therapeutic, if you ask me..

it’s one of those simple pleasures in life. and you’re right, Varnes, i could just sit with my wife all day long, her personality is uplifting enough where that would be a great day

She meant she should have studied Art Smith (You insert a surname.)

ZING! (Arlo, that one went right over her head!)

The male equivalent is that any guy who can manage to boil water and flip a hamburger thinks he’s Bobby Flay.

It’s amazing how many people don’t know that coloring books train hand-eye coordination in one of the most pleasant ways possible.

I was always in a hurry to get it finished. Talk about AD. It was before we understood that people learn differently.

I am 69 and the first thing I bought when I retired was colors and a coloring book. Next, paper dolls.

Y’know, one of the most gripeful things to happen in my education days occurred when an art teacher in the third grade had us draw and color an actual model (in this case it was a plum, so don’t get all silly). (I went to Hillsdale Elementary School in Dormont, Pittsburgh, and even in the earliest grades we went to different classrooms for different subjects.) After I drew and colored the plum with what I regarded as subtle variations in hue, I took a crayon and colored the entire background in blaring, blatant, blazing red! Layers and layers of it. To my third-grade eye, it was magnificent!

Guess what – the teacher made me do the plum over again, without the red background! I was so mad. I knew even then that my artistic integrity was being violated. Hmmmpf.

Not too late to study.

I prefer colored pencils to crayons. That being said, my daughter grew up knowing that some coloring books were hers, some were mine. Some crayons were hers, some where mind. :o) We liked to color together. (we both still color)

I stay in the lines if they are 1/2 inch thick…

Don’t some of the more successful artists go outside the lines?

I think most men would prefer a woman who was willing to go outside of the lines, to try something more adventurous.

Altair Designs Coloring Book in the 1970s for me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Burrows#Altair_Design.2FImages

Coloring books also help to develop the use of the small muscles in the fingers and hands. I used to stress this to my early elementary art students.

Did anyone ever have a Spirograph? I could do that for hours too. It would be even cooler now with all my different colored pens!

The best...(He was good too.And, yes, the book was based on them, but even better would’ve been some based on the actual stories in the collection.)

She did! That’s how they met!