Latest lifestyle craze: Colouring books for adults

Colouring to combat stress? You're not alone.

Intricate adult colouring books are the latest lifestyle craze to grip the United States, generating millions of fans, booming sales and libraries falling over themselves to host workshops.

Walk into any New York bookstore, and you'll find them artfully laid out on tables or filling entire shelves.

Buyers can choose from Sanskrit patterns, urban landscapes, butterflies and flowers all offering "stress relieving patterns." The latest fashion? The swear word version.

Amazon sells hundreds of them, including nine on the top 20 bestseller list. Fans post their finished designs and swap tips on Facebook or Pinterest.

Dover Publications, which prints dozens of colouring books, decreed August 2 as National Colouring Book Day, sponsoring parties and hosting an online group discussion board for tips on how to throw a successful bash at home.

"It calms us down to be colouring," Linda Turner, a licensed creative arts psychotherapist in Manhattan, explained of the trend born in Europe.

"If you are really with it, if you are really in the presence of colouring the colours and just being with the art, it is a wonderful way to support calming and presence and relaxation," she told AFP.

Turner said that while children are willing to explore and experiment, adults are not necessarily so comfortable with their creativity.

"These colouring books, they look adult, they look sophisticated... and they are going to create, and they are going to be present in the moment and have fun... In ways that are safe for them," she added.

Since October, 19 branches of the New York Public Library in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island have run colouring workshops, some on a weekly basis.

"We are providing the space and the material and that allows the patrons to socialise with their friends, or meet people that they would never have met before, or do an art work as a group," said Kelly Yim-Foulke, adult programming specialist at the New York Public Library.

She says colouring is easy to do, requires no particular talent and brings back "very fond memories" of being a child.