Beautiful Music Lover
I’ve been wanting to tell you about one of my favorite new apps for a long time now. However…. as is so my way… I’ve been waiting for today, National Coloring Book Day.
Yes, my brain does work like that….
The app is the Recolor App and I love it with all of my being. I have the app on both my iPad and my iPhone. I really have no idea how I ever got along without it and am anxious for you to get your fingers on the free app and fall in love too.
Recolor is a beautifully creative and high-quality coloring book on mobile, including +1100 gorgeous art illustrations. It’s as easy as possible to figure out – you won’t even need a teenager to explain it to you.
Below are a couple of benefits to this creative and fun app.
Ice Cream Cone: Some Images are Simple, While Others Are More Complex
RELAXATION: Fun Way to Relax and Unwind
People, crazily enough, seem to think that if you work from home you are a stranger to stressful days. When I encounter such mindsets (depending upon the day I’m having at the time), I either laugh or fight to contain a plethora of words that’d make my mom blush.
Regardless of your vocation – lawyer, writer, housewife, teacher, blogger, salesman, stay-at-home mom, businesswoman, nurse, office manager…. you know what a stressful day looks like, what it sounds like, and what it feels like. Basically, if you’re a human, you’re intimate with stress.
One of the best ways to deal with stress is to unwind and to get your mind as far away from the stress as possible. The Recolor app allows you to do just that by “escaping” into a fun world where your biggest concern is whether to make a cat orange, black, or white or whether you want to create a lake scene that depicts the lake during the day or evening.
Ahhhh… just thinking about this creative world makes me feel peaceful.
A “Mandala”
MENTAL FITNESS: Get in Touch With Your Creative Side
As you may know, I have a mental fitness blog (Out of Bounds) where I share tips for staying mentally sharp, preventing Alzheimer’s and Dementia, battling anxiety and stress, etc. I do untold amounts of research for my mental fitness blog (as well as each of my blogs, of course.). The top experts in the field of mental health recommend “exercising” your creativity as well as your memorization and critical thinking skills. Yet the creative aspect is one many people ignore. A lot of people will eat the foods necessary for brain health, read thought-provoking books, and even make sure they learn how to do new skills or educate themselves in new areas.
While each of these areas are excellent… make that very excellent… if they’re ignoring exercising their creativity, they aren’t doing all they can for their brain’s health. Your brain craves the opportunity to be creative as much as it craves the opportunity to learn new things.
Adult coloring books (physical or virtual) are a fun and excellent way to provide this creativity your brain desires. The “mandalas” (one is pictured above) can be especially mentally-stimulating. If you decide to make a certain shape a certain color, it’s kind of stimulating, mentally and creatively, to sort through the “puzzle” to find all the similar shapes.
It’s also very stimulating, creatively, to decide on harmonizing colors. Choosing a color scheme is one of my favorite things about the app.
COPE WITH ANXIETY: Entertaining Way to Keep Your Hands and Minds Busy
While I, personally, do now struggle with anxiety, I have read a great deal about the fight many people face with it. In fact, I have several members in my family who deal with anxiety and the many colorful ways it manifests itself.
One of the fastest, simplest, and most beneficial ways to cope with anxiety is simply to occupy your hands and your minds. When you do so, it gives the “nervous energy” that’s buzzing around your head a place to go! It’s as though you usher them into the art room and close the door behind them.
Don’t worry about them, though, they’ll be far too busy having fun to worry about the door being closed.
There’s simply a lot to be said for spending time with an activity that’s all about colors, beauty, creativity, and good old-fashioned fun. You can share your creations with others in the Recolor Community, or you can simply use it as your own personal space to unwind and experience adult recess.
Physical Benefits
No, coloring in a great coloring app isn’t going to burn enough calories to qualify as physical fitness (unless, of course, you color while on a treadmill or stationary bike – which are excellent ideas actually), but when you look at the benefits named above, you have all you need to know about the physical benefits. Where our minds and hearts (emotions) go, our physical bodies follow. When we’re under stress, dealing with anxiety, or not stimulating our minds enough, our physical health suffers.
By the same token, when we’re taking care of these other areas, our physical health responds favorably.
You might even find yourself snacking less at night (especially if you’re one who snacks as a result of stress or anxiety), which most definitely is physically beneficial.
I hope you’ll check out the Recolor App – you’re going to love it. It’s free, fun*, and… trust me… fabulous!
* It’s free to download and you receive new “free” images to color daily. There is an option to pay for access to far more pictures, colors, and effects but I personally have never done so. It simply isn’t necessary, unless you just can’t get enough of the fun!
An Image I Haven’t Colored… Yet!
More About Recolor
Each image, when clicked, fills your screen. You’re presented with a palette of colors to choose from. You scroll at the bottom to find more. Above the image, you’ll see an option (looks like a finger swiping) that allows you to “sweep” the color across an image as opposed to filling one small area at a time. You can easily undo a color if it no longer suits you… then promptly find one that does.
In addition to a great variety of colors, you can also choose an “effect” for your image. The free ones are Shadow, Wall, Crumbled Paper, and Art Paper. They’ve also come out with “Filters” for your image – kind of like instagram filters.
There are so many delicious options!
One final note – I love the diversity this app showcases. The individuals available to color cover various races and sexes. It’s just another thing this app gets “right.”
TIP: If you find a picture that was especially fun to color, go back and “edit” the picture by coloring it all over again. See the beautiful music lover at the top of the post? She has worn red, orange, gold, and purple. While she was stunning in each, she and I both decided that purple was her color. Makes her smile stand out, don’t you think?
Check out the Recolor App today.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a coffee picture to color…
I recently left Recolor due to the fact that I was so distraught, I was seeing pics of children cutting themselves, violence, cyber bullying and sexual role play. The paying subscribers were reporting these issues on a daily basis….this should have been Recolors job! It’s not a stress reliever for so many of us, while other adults turned a blind eye, I could not. I reported pics for months and in the end my health was affected so I chose to leave…Recolor is a disgraceful app! I’m reading so many great reviews and I just cringe! They still advertise as an adult app, but clearly it’s age 9+, which they recently changed, it was 4+….so basically they false advertise, Parents please be warned, this app is a social media app! A playground for predators, I’ve seen it for myself! An app that was once decent has turned into chaos.
I hope by me writing this others will investigate this app and see what’s really going on.
Thank you
Thank you
Hi, DeeDee – Thanks for stopping by. I just have to ask if you happen to have any particular pictures screencapped or saved that you could share as examples? I honestly have never, never, never, never seen anything like you mention in the Recolor app. Not even remotely like this. Could you have a different app, maybe? I don’t mean to sound so skeptical and I’m not remotely accusing you of not knowing what you’re talking about. I’m just honestly trying to get to the bottom of it. As a mother, I would have NOTHING to do with an app like the one you mentioned. I am not a paid subscriber, so I’m wondering if paid subscribers have access to different pictures (horrible ones it’d seem!) than the rest of us. Could these be uploaded from other users or something? The only ones I see are the ones that appear daily and are completely free to color. I color my pics (always perfectly harmless pictures) and go on about my way. I just looked through the Kids Pics out of curiosity and they look like the pics you’d see in a coloring book from any store. I just wonder where these pics you describe come from. I honestly want to get to the bottom of it because if something ugly is going on, I’ll certainly take down my positive review. I just don’t personally see the ugly. – Joi