I can’t imagine anyone ever finishing every picture. The pictures are clever, very detailed and have lots of little fun touches, such as treasure items to search for throughout the book. Well, if you want to colour in other people’s pictures, it’s great.

Having got all that off my chest, what’s this book actually like? Everyone can draw and if you think you can’t, you just have to start and keep going until you can. Also, while I’m semi-rant mode, if you do want to be creative, why not draw or doodle? Put something new into the world. I just don’t like the term and it’s not something I want to do myself.

There’s nothing wrong with it, the Harry Potter books are fantastic, however old you are, and colouring in is better than many things you could get up to on a winter’s evening. Calling it adult colouring is like those Harry Potter books you could buy with different covers so you could pretend you weren’t reading a children’s book. Adult colouring as a phrase/phase/fad is just marketing. (If it’s one of my own pictures, I can choose to go out of the lines but if it’s someone else’s I somehow feel constrained by them.) Also: colouring in is colouring in. I do not like going outside the lines so trying to avoid that is quite stressful. Also, I find colouring in to be not at all relaxing. The drawings are someone else’s creation and I would prefer to create something of my own. I bought this book to try out colouring pens and pencils in and I’ll say this upfront: colouring in is not my thing.

The lost ocean coloring book