If you're the sort who cannot fathom why adults would spend hours coloring in drawings in books, or now on iOS apps, you're also the sort who is going to wonder what in the world you could add to update such an app. You have a point there, though you're very harsh about the coloring-in bit. Nonetheless, there are apps, they are updated, and they're updated well:
Millie Marotta's Coloring Adventures 1.1 is now out.
All coloring apps -- and there are many -- do their best to emulate the various coloring books that there are for adults. You get some number of black and white sketches that, in every case, have a huge number of sections you can scribble in: you get birds with detailed feathers, rather than just a single outline, for instance. It's a job of focusing on small, small details, it's a job of concentrating on a long and large task; of coloring in something through small, small steps.
That's the point of these. They're not hard, but they take concentration, and it's like a trick: focusing on one part of a drawing at time isn't strenuous, but it's occupying. It's occupying enough that it stops you thinking about other things, and that right there is the satisfaction of coloring apps: they are relaxing because they push other thoughts away.
Millie Marotta is the author of many coloring books -- if "author" is the right word -- and this Coloring Adventures 1.1 app presents you with a number of drawings from those. As shipped, they are chiefly of birds, but you also get the odd deer drawing. You get six drawings for free in the app, and actually that may be enough for you: there's no limit to the number of times you can open any of these drawings, and start coloring in. If the mood takes you, color one bird in muted browns and oranges, then open a new copy of it up and color this one in bright reds. Go crazy.
Whatever colors you pick, it will take you hours. If you do it on an iPad with a typical stylus, then it will also take patience. If it you do it on an iPad with your finger, it will take a lot of pinching out to make the drawing large enough, and it might take some Valium before you're done. Whereas if you color in using an Apple Pencil, you will become so relaxed that you'll forget you've spent a thousand dollars on an electronic equivalent of a coloring book that would've cost you a buck.
We're not heavy users of our Apple Pencil yet, though it is seeping into our workflow, but we are very much fans of it because of how natural it feels when you use it. When you use it on Millie Marotta's Coloring Adventures, you actually don't feel as if you're using it at all: this is not some stunning technology in your hands, this is red, or blue, or green, or orange on the drawing. There is a strange disconnection where you do enjoy the feel of the Pencil, you do find the rhythmic stroking of the nib across the glass soothing, yet you also feel the color goes from your head to the drawing, with nothing in between.
What's new in version 1.1 is that there's been a revamp to the controls and their layout that includes fewer preset colors, but now also a way to customize them through a Color Picker. As well as a straight pencil tool for coloring in, you can now also use a broader brush. Version 1.0 was fine and absorbing, but 1.1 does feel worked on, developed, evolved -- and while it takes a moment to adjust to where these controls are, you wouldn't go back.
The app is free, but includes two different kinds of in-app purchases. One is exactly what you'd expect: you can buy extra packs of drawings, and once you've done that, they sit there in the app right alongside the existing ones. Right at this moment, there is only one extra pack available -- further ones are shown as Coming Soon -- and that's a bird one that costs $1.
However, there is also a Millie Marotta store within the app, which really just takes you out to a website where you can buy books. As in actual books. That takes you a moment to realize, that what you'd be getting is on that old paper stuff, but whether it's the real books or the extra iOS packs, there is something gently appealing about the no-pressure sales technique. It's very clear that there are these options, you will not ever mistake what's free and what isn't, yet the sense of it all is that this is a place to relax, not to have sales pushed at you.
We can't pretend that Millie Marotta's Coloring Adventures 1.1, or indeed any other such app, will change the world for you. Yet apps can be quiet and rather serene, apps can calm you down, and this one feels to us as if it's been made with some care. It's a tiny, tiny thing, but we appreciate how the app is different in different stores: in the UK App Store, for instance, the makers have including the letter u to make it Millie Marotta's Colouring Adventures 1.1. The description is similarly different in the UK and US stores too, and we just see that and tip our hats to a nice attention to detail.
Millie Marotta's Coloring Adventures 1.1 requires iOS 9.1 or later, and
is free in the App Store.
Who is Millie Marotta's Coloring Adventures 1.1 for:
Tricky. It's definitely not for everyone, because there's a fine line between calming relaxation and irritating slowness. If you have an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil, though, you should definitely go get the free app and see what it does to you.
Who is Millie Marotta's Coloring Adventures 1.1 not for:
If you don't have any kind of stylus, then this wouldn't feel so much a coloring-in app as a smudging-in one.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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