my favourite crayon is periwinkle.

the other day i was reading about the increase in popularity of colouring books for adults and the article mentioned there are also smartphone apps for colouring. huh, i thought. i like colouring. so i found and downloaded an app and coloured me up a couple of pictures. it was okay, but not any great shakes, and certainly not what i would call actual colouring. it was more like tapping the screen. if i am going to dance on the edge of carpal tunnel for the sake of tapping the smartphone screen, i am going to be doing something useful -- like crushing candy.

colouring with an app gives you precision control. all the colour goes inside the line, automatically. there's no challenge and you can pay very little attention to finish the picture. real colouring (with crayons, the only REAL colouring) requires attention.

you'd think it would be stressful or tiring to pay attention but it's ironically relaxing precisely because you are paying attention. see, when you get your mind occupied on this relatively menial task, it can't wander off into dark ugly places or dredge up that work project or whatnot. that's why people are attracted to colouring.

in the app, colour is applied completely evenly. there's no allowance for pressing the crayon harder or softer. or for anomolies like, when you get that odd hard dry spot in the crayon and it suddenly goes scritch-scritch and puts a darker line on the page.

back in the day, i had this friend who would press a dark outline of each space's designated colour, inside the printed outline. this heavy colour line added a sort of dimension to the picture. not like realism because for godsakes we were in the 3rd grade pressing coloured wax onto groundwood pages, but a dimension. it was cool and enviable and not something you can do with an app.

with the app, you can try different colours, combine them, erase them and try again. there's no incentive to plan up-front. you can just dash in all willy-nilly and start smacking down colours, and if you don't like how it looks, just try something else. again, there's no challenge in this. with real colouring, you have to be careful and think about your colour choices. once you've put colour on the paper, there is no going back.

in conclusion, real colouring is better.