Overview

Project Information
Sakura's Near the Lake (Simple Painting)

Progress

• First time painting via Paint by Numbers!

Reflection

I was inspired by Wheezy Waiter's video, Why Do People Like Adult Coloring Books? In this video, a few YouTubers experimented with coloring every day for 30 days to investigate the potential effects this activity has on their mental wellbeing over time. The participants used adult coloring books, where line art is already drawn so that they only needed to focus on coloring, as opposed to completely drawing and designing something from scratch.

One YouTuber mentioned that this type of activity was very calming because they were "creating without expectations". This idea fascinated me because oftentimes the expectation of not creating something up-to-par can hinder one's creative abilities and progress. Thus, the idea of coloring (or painting) something that already exists and that which will not be displayed on social media eleviates the pressures of external expectation.

Paint By Numbers provides everything: the canvas, line art, paint colors, and paint locations. Finishing a painting only requires knowing how to paint within the lines (which is surprisingly harder than I expected in small areas). Thus, because I knew I'd be documenting my progress, I chose to do Paint By Numbers to remove all potential stress factors during the painting process so that I can focus on how the activity makes me feel, as opposed to worrying about how the final product will turn out.

I have not finished painting yet, but, below are some progress photos of what has been done so far.

Initial Canvas

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5