Recall that magic time when you were 7. You had a new box of crayons, with pristine, gorgeous tips. A book was presented, and a choir of angels might have sung because neither the scrawls of siblings nor frienemies sullied the pages.  You looked at, and selected colors like Sky Blue and Periwinkle and spent happy moments - hours, perhaps, making that white and black page your Technicolor, magical wonderland.

Tacoma artist Jennevieve Schlemmer is not like we were at 7. She has the ability to take pencils, pens, paint, or sheets of glass, even wire frames and trash bags and transform these things into art.  And yet she has been going back to that idyllic 7-year-old place.  "About a year ago, a friend introduced me," she says about her involvement in adult coloring.  "I like coloring because of the calming, meditative action of it," she explains.  "It's totally different when I'm coloring than when I'm drawing.  I use a different part of my brain."

And there are scores of adults like her in Tacoma and beyond who have had the same experiences.  Lunchtime sessions; evening dinner sessions; random acts of creativity have been springing up from business to community - all tapping into the magic phenomenon that had us happy at 7 and now again at varying age-intervals beyond.  Yeah - adult coloring has become a big deal.  Schlemmer saw this firsthand when she went to Powell's Bookstore in Portland recently, looking for a coloring book.  She found something like 80 coloring books on the shelves.  And by this point, she had started her own project.

The rough draft for her coloring book began in July.  A departure from the standard mandalas, flowers, patterns and humorous coloring books like Unicorns are Jerks, Jennevieve's book, Fortuna, started with a narrative based on a map, and grew into a story in pictures with a theme of magical realism. After a focus group and edits taking into account their feedback, she's now growing her project toward Kickstarter status to fund various points of the publishing process.  

And yet, she's not just working her Kickstarter campaign for funding, though that venture-raising system is known for helping finance dreams.  As her campaign kicks off Oct. 20, her website (www.shortlegstudio.com) will continue updating potential backers.  She has fed into the Kickstarter process:  "I've been doing Kickstarter for four years.  I've backed twenty-four campaigns."  Doing so, she understands that sometimes the campaigns fail.

She doesn't seem daunted.  She will continue offering coloring pages on her website and will move toward her goal of creating a book that will bring its users magic moments like they had as 7-year-olds."Somewhere along the line, people are told they're not artists," she muses.  "No one stops and thinks  ‘I don't know how' when they're coloring."

Schlemmer's Kickstarter campaign will run from Oct. 20 to Nov. 20. Offering support is essentially a pre-sale; different levels will get different gifts.  Visit her website at www.shortlegstudio.com for updates or look for the Fortuna Kickstarter campaign.