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Johanna basford the enchanted forest6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() When the genre stormed the best-seller lists five years ago, Basford’s debut, Secret Garden, led the charge. She’s a pioneer-possibly the pioneer- of the modern adult coloring book, a childhood pastime retrofitted for frazzled grown-ups. ![]() The 35-year-old Basford is something of a revelation herself. I do remember the day that I learned that if you heated up the crayons, you could bend them. “But I don’t think I had any specific favorite colors. “As a child, I used to think the yellow and the white were just a bit redundant,” she says in a soft burr that tends to drift upward at the end of a sentence, making statements sound like questions. Basford sits in a pub in nearby Ellon, her hands wrapped around a cup of English breakfast tea, comparing the colors of nature with those found in a 120-pack of Crayola crayons. On this biting afternoon, the sea changes shades with each shift of cloud and rain and wind. Throughout the winter the shoreline is invariably a few degrees warmer than inland. During the summer months, strong gusts combined with the powdery sand can ruin a perfectly good sandwich. A wildlife Eden, this stretch of heathland serves as a motorway for birds that wheel in from the Arctic-red-throated divers, pink-footed geese and long-tailed ducks with cream and chocolate plumage. Not far from Johanna Basford’s home on the northeast coast of Scotland lies a parabola of golden-ocher sand where the proportion of sky to land is unlike anything you’ll likely see outside of a Bertolucci film. ![]()
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