National Coloring Book Day falls on 2 August every year, and in 2026 that is a Sunday. It is not an old tradition: Dover Publications invented it in 2015 to promote its Creative Haven line, at the exact moment adult coloring books were selling twelve times faster than the year before. The day has outlived the boom that produced it.

What National Coloring Book Day actually is

National Coloring Book Day is a publisher’s invention. Dover Publications launched it in 2015 to put a date on a market it had helped build, and chose 2 August. There is no legislation behind it, no founding committee and no charity attached, which is worth knowing before you read anywhere that it is a long-standing tradition.

What has survived is the date itself, now fixed and widely used. Libraries, museums and rival publishers all post free pages for it, and thousands of finished sheets go up under the hashtag each August. In 2026 it falls on a Sunday, the same weekday as the first observance in 2015, which is convenient if you want an unhurried afternoon with it.

Coloring books were an adult pastime first

The idea that coloring is a children’s activity adults have recently reclaimed gets the order backwards. Hand-coloring printed plates was a genteel accomplishment in the eighteenth century: Robert Sayer’s The Florist, issued in 1760, sold outline engravings of flowers to gentlemen and ladies who wanted to practise the skill. Coloring reached children later, once printing became cheap.

The book usually named as the first coloring book for children is The Little Folks’ Painting Book of 1879 — text by George Weatherly, outline engravings by Kate Greenaway, published by Cassell, Petter & Galpin in London, Paris and New York. It was a painting book in the literal sense: the plates were meant for watercolor, and a colored frontispiece showed you what the finished result should look like.

The McLoughlin Brothers of New York are the reason the format spread. They mass-produced cheap painting and coloring books through the late nineteenth century, and once Binney & Smith and the American Crayon Company had put wax crayons in every child’s hand, coloring settled firmly into the nursery. Dover’s first coloring book, Antique Automobiles in 1970, was an early attempt to point it back at grown-ups.

The boom the day was born into

Johanna Basford’s Secret Garden, published in 2013, is the book credited with starting the adult coloring craze, and it has sold more than eight million copies. Publishers who had treated coloring books as a low-margin children’s line suddenly had a bestseller category on their hands, and the shelves filled within about eighteen months.

The scale is easy to underrate. Nielsen counted one million coloring books sold in the United States in 2014 and twelve million in 2015, with more than 2,000 new titles that year against roughly 300 the year before. Dover had sold over eleven million Creative Haven books since launching the line in 2012, which is why a publisher, rather than a charity or a government, is the body that invented this day.

It did not hold. NPD BookScan put 2016 at fourteen million, a peak reached early in the year; that December was down two million on the December before. By early 2017 Barnes & Noble attributed nearly a third of a quarterly sales decline to coloring books alone. The category did not vanish, but the bubble did.

What coloring does, and what it does not

The strongest single study is a modest one. Flett and colleagues, writing in the Creativity Research Journal in 2017, gave 104 female university students either daily coloring or daily logic puzzles for one week. The coloring group reported lower anxiety and fewer depressive symptoms afterwards; the puzzle group did not. The authors called it preliminary evidence, and that is what it is.

The picture grows more cautious from there. A 2022 systematic review in Art Therapy pooled eight trials covering 578 participants and found that coloring a mandala was no better than free drawing at reducing anxiety in the moment, with the largest effects turning up in the least precise studies — the signature of publication bias.

So sitting down with a coloring page plausibly lowers how anxious you feel while you are doing it, and that is a real thing to want. Claims that it improves your general health, or sharpens concentration, are not what the trials measured. Nor is it art therapy: the American Art Therapy Association is explicit that coloring for self-care and treatment delivered by a credentialed art therapist are different things, and that the therapist is the part doing the work.

National Coloring Book Day Dates

This year National Coloring Book Day is celebrated on Sunday, Aug 02, 2026

Year	Date	Day
2026	Aug 02	Sunday
2027	Aug 02	Monday
2028	Aug 02	Wednesday
2029	Aug 02	Thursday
2030	Aug 02	Friday
2031	Aug 02	Saturday

How to mark the day

Celebrating National Coloring Book Day costs nothing beyond a sheet of paper and something to color with. Pick one of these and start.