As an alternative to the ‘coloring reset’ tag on social media, I have come up with 5 focuses for my coloring practice for 2026. These are the five things I want to focus on doing and learning this year.
1. Focus on fun and relaxation
I started coloring in August 2025 as a way to get out of my head and relax while being creative. From the start it was imperative to me that the process itself comes first and has to be fun. And that’s a focus I want to bring with me into the new year. While I do want to learn new techniques (because I think learning new things is fun), it is super important to me that my coloring practice stays fun and relaxed. If a page I started doesn’t sing to me anymore, I am more than welcome to set it aside or even abandon it instead of forcing my way through it.
Some of my favorite ways to steer away from any pressure I may feel when coloring are as follows:
- Print a coloring page and go to town with soft pastels and/or distress crayons – don’t color with pencils.
- Grab Small Victories and color one single flower on a vignette page.
- Let my Color Palette book decide my color palette.
- Find a page that does not sing to my from Memories or Imaginary Friends, remove it from the glue binding, grab a watersoluble medium like watercolor paint, distress watercolor pencils or ecoline and do a rough painting-style coloring session of one hour max. Don’t touch up or ‘finish’ the page thereafter. It’s done.
- Make a pretty gradient with one of my dry or wet background mediums in my mixed media journal.
2. Mastery of my toolkit
Over the past five months I’ve accumulated way too many new media and have not mastered any of them yet. In the upcoming year I want to focus on getting as comfortable as I can with these four tools in my current toolbox.
- Derwent Inktense for backgrounds, basing and actual coloring
- Caran d’Ache Neocolor II for backgrounds and basing
- Distress crayons for backgrounds
- Aquarel for backgrounds (and basing)
3. Work on techniques
I’d also like to familiarize myself with some new techniques that I don’t feel super confident in yet.
- Coloring skin
- Glass effect
- Bokeh effect
- Night sky (bonus ponts for aurora borealis)
- Pointilism shading with fineliners
4. Color in my Buddy coloring book
I have a buddy coloring book with my bestie Iris! In 2026 I would very much like to color a number of pages from this book together with her. I’m super excited to make my coloring practice a little more social and to have the accountability and body doubling bonus of a joint coloring project book with my best friend. ❤
5. Coloring shortlist
I don’t want to make a point of choosing a focus artist because I know how much of a mood colorist I am and I’d like to be able to choose my artist and book as I see fit. I have however made a pre-selection of 9 coloring pages, which I’d like to color in order to give some attention to all the gorgeous books I own! That would come down to approximately 2 pages per season. I’ve not necessarily chosen season-coded pictures only, but there’s definitely some seasonal pages there.
