“The first print run was a tentative 13,000 copies. “I had a hunch that there were adults out there who would love to return to the days of finger-paints and carefree playing with color,” says Basford, a freelance illustrator whose initial pitch to a publisher was met with baffled silence.
It’s filled with filigreed visions of ferns and flowers and frogs rendered delicately in black and white, all drawn by hand. When the genre stormed the best-seller lists five years ago, Basford’s debut, Secret Garden, led the charge. She’s a pioneer-possibly the pioneer- of the modern adult coloring book, a childhood pastime retrofitted for frazzled grown-ups.
The 35-year-old Basford is something of a revelation herself. I do remember the day that I learned that if you heated up the crayons, you could bend them. “But I don’t think I had any specific favorite colors. “As a child, I used to think the yellow and the white were just a bit redundant,” she says in a soft burr that tends to drift upward at the end of a sentence, making statements sound like questions. Basford sits in a pub in nearby Ellon, her hands wrapped around a cup of English breakfast tea, comparing the colors of nature with those found in a 120-pack of Crayola crayons. On this biting afternoon, the sea changes shades with each shift of cloud and rain and wind. Throughout the winter the shoreline is invariably a few degrees warmer than inland.
During the summer months, strong gusts combined with the powdery sand can ruin a perfectly good sandwich. A wildlife Eden, this stretch of heathland serves as a motorway for birds that wheel in from the Arctic-red-throated divers, pink-footed geese and long-tailed ducks with cream and chocolate plumage. Not far from Johanna Basford’s home on the northeast coast of Scotland lies a parabola of golden-ocher sand where the proportion of sky to land is unlike anything you’ll likely see outside of a Bertolucci film.
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