Art Deco Coloring Pages: What Makes One Good, and What Makes One Exhausting

Art deco is having another moment, and adult coloring has noticed. Search for art deco coloring pages and you will find thousands. Print a few and you will notice something else: a lot of them are exhausting.

They are not badly drawn. They are just drawn as pattern rather than as a picture, and repeating geometry at small scale is a very particular kind of work. Here is what separates a deco page you finish from one you abandon halfway.

The vocabulary, so you can recognize it

Art deco runs on a small set of shapes, and once you can name them you start seeing them everywhere:

• The sunburst, rays coming out of a half circle or a full one, usually behind something or above a door.
• Stepped forms, the ziggurat outline you see on skyscrapers, mirrors and clock cases.
• Fans and arcs, layered like scallops or peacock feathers.
• Chevrons and zigzags, usually as a border or a floor.
• Streamlined curves, long smooth lines suggesting speed, on cars, trains and the edges of furniture.
• Stylized florals, especially calla lilies and lotus shapes, flattened and simplified rather than botanical.

It is not the same as art nouveau, which people mix up with it constantly. Nouveau is organic, whiplash curves, vines and hair and things that grow. Deco is geometric, symmetrical and machine made. If it looks like it grew, it is nouveau. If it looks like it was built, it is deco.

What makes a deco page satisfying instead of tiring

Scenes, not just wallpaper. A page of repeating chevrons is a texture exercise. A woman at a sunburst mirror, a lit theater entrance, a balcony at night, those give you somewhere to make decisions. The geometry should support a subject, not replace it.

Spaces you can actually fill. Deco lends itself to tiny repeated detail, which looks gorgeous on screen and is miserable with a marker. The good pages keep most shapes large enough to fill comfortably and use the small detail as accent.

No solid black doing the work. A lot of deco art is printed with large black areas, because that is how the original posters were made. On a coloring page, filled black is a space taken away from you. The contrast should come from shape and line weight instead, leaving the color decisions to the person holding the pencil.

Symmetry with something to break it. Perfect symmetry is restful for about a minute and then it is boring. One asymmetric element, a figure turned slightly, a light on one side, gives the eye a place to land.

Coloring deco, specifically

Deco was built on a small number of strong color relationships, and they still work.

The classic four. Black, cream, gold, and one jewel tone, usually emerald, sapphire or a deep garnet. Restrained and unmistakably period.

Sunset on a building. Peach, coral, and a deep teal in the shadows. This is the palette of 1930s posters and it makes architecture look lit from the side.

Evening. Midnight blue, silver grey, blush, and one hot accent for lipstick, a lamp or a sign. Very effective on night scenes with windows.

The temptation is to use every color because the shapes are so separated. Resist it. Deco's whole look is a few colors arranged with confidence. Pick four, repeat them deliberately, and let the geometry carry the interest.

On metallics: gold gel pen over an already colored area reads as metal far better than gold used on bare white paper. Color the shape in an ochre or warm brown first, let it dry, then lay the metallic over the parts that would catch light. Metallic straight onto white paper tends to look like a sticker.

On repeated borders: color them last, and pick colors already used in the middle of the page. Borders colored first tend to end up louder than the subject they are framing.

Why I am drawing a whole book of it

Gilded Calm is the book this post came out of. It is an art deco coloring book for women over 40, and it is built on exactly these complaints: too much shading, spaces too small, women drawn as mannequins rather than as adults, and pattern where a scene should be.

So it is fifty original designs, every one on its own page, with open coloring spaces, no grey fill, no solid black masses, and women who look like women in their forties, fifties and sixties. Sunburst mirrors, evening gowns, city windows, and gardens in the last of the evening sun. It lands on Amazon this week.

If you want to know the moment it is out, the waitlist gets told first.

Meanwhile: pick four colors, color the border last, and put the gold over something rather than onto nothing.