Several years ago, when I was only just getting into drawing and watercolours, I spent long long hours doing colouring books. They were my way to add colour to a variety of drawings I didn’t feel able to draw myself. One day I was sitting there colouring in a single cushion in a book of interior designs and wished it was a page that just had this cushion on it so I could feel I had completed something. I realised that I didn’t always love doing the big complex drawings, and I wished that books existed with quick, simple projects.
The idea of a 5-minute colouring book came to me then, and I had a rough idea of what it would be. Small, pocket sized, one object on a page eg, one cushion, one lamp, one flower etc. Each book would be themed.
But I wasn’t confident enough with my drawing to pull it off, and as far as I could see, Amazon didn’t do any great pocket-book sizes. So I shelved the idea.
Even when years later, Joanna Basford (queen of the colouring books) announced her book, “Small Victories” – a colouring book with lots of small, achievable colouring pages – coming in ten months time, I didn’t have the oomph needed to beat her to the punchline. I just wasn’t interested at that point, especially now that I was selling my art through Willow Lane.
The encounter that changed everything.
But all that changed about five weeks ago when God woke me up at 3 AM and downloaded, Matrix-style, an entire project, fully complete, including the cover and the text for the keywords on Amazon and the text for the sales page and on and on, into my head. It was an incredible experience. The amount of information He downloaded in mere minutes was breathtaking.
The idea was it would be a collaboration between Naomi and myself – as all of Willow Lane is – and He said we would bring it out in a few weeks. He even told me the theme for the first book.
The blueprint for it all was so detailed, and so different to how I originally envisioned it years earlier, that I knew it was God.
So the miraculous project began.
And so Naomi and I worked tirelessly on this new book venture, and miraculously, it has all come together in a few weeks, just like God said it would. The whole process confirmed over and over that God had indeed spoken.
I remember, for instance, in my download, seeing a flash of the cover, but then I forgot about it given the volume of the other information in my head. I did not give Naomi any directions on the cover, but when she showed me her idea, I knew I’d seen it before. In fact, it was so familiar, I thought she must have copied a cover I’d already seen somewhere online. As I stared, I realised that was the exact cover I’d seen in the download. I was stunned. To put that in perspective, this cover is unlike any other cover for colouring books online. She didn’t simply go for what was commonly out there.
There were so many moments like that, too many to list. The long and the short of it is, we are super proud and excited to introduce to you the very first in what we hope are many books in our 5-Minute Colouring Book Series.
It is out now, on Amazon, in hardcover and softcover, available around the world.
Free colouring pages, and introducing our colouring gallery.
To celebrate, we are giving you two free downloads of colouring pages (below) made just for this. One is our cover as a colouring page. The other is a mandala. Neither are in the book and they’re certainly not 5-Minutes, but we would still love to see what you do with them.
Consider colouring them and sending them to us for our Colouring Gallery, or buying our book and sending us copies of pages you’ve coloured, painted, embellished or decorated, whether you took five-minutes or a hundred and five minutes.
And while you’re there, why not chat with us? We’ve turned comments on down the bottom. Consider it the Beta-program. If it adds value, we will keep it. If it’s of no interest to anyone, we’ll simply close the comments and think no more on it.
If you want to keep the colouring pages below, click on it and right-click to save. You are most welcome to share.
And while we have your attention, can we just say that we are nothing without our customers and readers. We absolutely depend on people like you to get the word out about us. If you could tell others about our book, or about Willow Lane, or perhaps even share our colouring pages below, it would mean the world to us.
About the Author: Lisa Saul
