Coloring Inside the Lines

cattleya rex

an orchid in colored pencil

I have been doing a lot of drawing recently. I find that the hour or so I have every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday late afternoons at the Healthplex is just right for getting some colored pencil work done. Mike and I exercise those evenings, but Mike's exercise takes a lot longer than mine. Frankly after about forty or forty-five minutes of it, I get bored....and tired.

So I take my bag full of colored pencils, regular pencils,, and black markers out to the lobby of the Healthplex, settle down at one of the tables and blissfully draw. Maybe once a week someone stops by to say hello or to look at my current drawings. It's a good setting for a little talk and a little art.

I start with a blank page in my sketch book and draw a 5" X 7" rectangle on the page with black marker. I draw my picture with pencil, make any adjustments I need, and then I ink in the lines with marker. This is the easy part and is done in less than ten minutes. I erase the pencil marks and then start laying in the color. The coloring takes a long time, because with the color pencils I need to work in layers. Most portions of the work need at least three layers of pencil, sometimes all one color and sometimes layers of different colors, depending on how I want it to look. Sometimes I need a many as four or five layers. As I work I need to keep sharpening the pencils because I work almost exclusively in saturated pigments. So just keeping my pencils sharp enough to work with takes time.

Something happened last week that took me a little aback. I was working on an orchid when a couple of women came over to the table. One took a quick look at my work which at that point was mostly just the inked page with a few colors here and there. She asked me very flippantly if I always colored within the lines. Then the two of them laughed and exited the building.

When I am drawing I pretty well stuck in my right brain, the mute side of my mind, so I didn't reply to her. And she wasn't looking for a scathing reply--my best kind of reply. But I got to thinking about the whole thing with coloring outside the lines.

I guess that when people say that children should color outside the lines they mean that children should be taught to be more creative. I agree wholeheartedly. But in reality, children don't need much of a shove to be creative early on. It is equating coloring outside the lines with creativity that I question. Certainly I color within the lines. I made the lines for a specific purpose--to organize the space within that 35 square inches of sketch paper. Coloring outside the lines would be sloppy and would not convey my message or meaning through my drawings.

As to a first grader who is reminded to sometimes to color outside the lines, that would seem sloppy and uncoordinated to her. Better to color the ducks in a row bright blue with purple beaks. Better yet to have the first graders draw their own ducks. Why would we want to ruin a perfectly good drawing with sloppy work?

As I write this I am thinking--when is it appropriate to color outside the lines? To show emotions that are outside the lines--anger at having to color dumb ducks at all; contempt for cute ducks in a row in coloring book after coloring book; playfulness in how ridiculous-looking I can make those flaming ducks; creativity at how I can change those f++king ducks into cubist parodies of themselves.

Well, I am glad I was in the right side of my brain when that woman made her inane comment.