As children we were taught to color to help improve our motor skills, prepare for school, understand colors, stimulate creativity and to keep us entertained. However as we aged we gave up coloring for other hobbies and responsibilities. Over the past couple of years, coloring has made a big resurgence among adults as it has shown to reduce stress and create an environment for creativity. No matter your age, coloring is a fun and creative hobby that anyone can pick up. For those of you who don’t want to invest in pens, pencils and paper there’s an app for your iOS devices called Color Therapy. It’s designed for adults, but kids are finding it just as entertaining making it the perfect app for Spring Break. .
Color Therapy is free to download from the App Store. Once installed, you will have access to 1000s of free coloring pages in a wide range of categories. I tend to like geometric patterns, food and historical art as my main topics for coloring. There’s quite a list of topics to choose from: Seasonal, Floral & Trees, Animals, Typography, Zodiac, Art, Patterns, Mandalas, Goth, and People. You can also unlock using any of the images with in-app purchases which start at 99 cents. There’s probably more than enough free images to color to keep you occupied for a year before you’d need to actually spend money.
There’s a free color palette to use and you can also unlock more colors with in-app purchases. As much as I hate in-app purchases, this is one area where you should probably spend. The free color palette is good enough, but you can get much more color diversity if you pay to play. You only need to pay once to use those colors on any of the free images.
I used the app for a couple of weeks on my iPad Pro 12.9 with the Pencil and my iPhone 7 Plus with my finger. Using the Pencil with the iPad Pro makes it easier to color the right section with accuracy, although there is no option to actually recreate coloring with it. Simply pick a color and tap on a section to change it to that color. While the act of coloring is a nice feature to have, I actually prefer the method given by Color Therapy. A stylus on a glass tablet does not offer the same feeling as coloring on paper using a pen or pencils – the act of coloring using a Pencil feels like I’m just trying to scratch the display on my iPad. Selecting colors and then sections also requires my concentration and allows for me to change the colors more quickly which gives me satisfied with the end result faster.
Using Color Therapy on my iPhone 7 Plus was a little less gratifying. I found myself needing to zoom in far too often so I could select the right section with my fat finger. However, it still offered entertainment value when I wanted to kill a few minutes at a time.
Having quite a few friends with kids gave me the perfect opportunity to test Color Therapy on them. The kids ranged in ages of 3-11 years old, and they all enjoyed Color Therapy. They took over my devices and colored dozens of pictures they then emailed to their parents to use as wallpapers. Color Therapy is an app that is good for kids, especially those with lots of free time coming up like those on Spring Break. When they go to sleep, you can take over your iPad and color yourself to sleep.
Check out Color Therapy at the App Store today.