Adult Colour By Number Puzzles
In the last few years, there has been a real trend towards what were once considered children's puzzles being made harder and put into adult form. No doubt you've come across the adult colouring trend and perhaps the adult dot-to-dot trend? The latest addition to this is colour by number puzzles for adults.
The way these puzzles work is quite simple: a grid is divided into lots of individual shapes that could take many different forms (for instance square, circular, hexagonal, triangular). Many of the cells in the grid will then contain a number. This tells you to colour in the cell a given colour. For instance the number 1 might correspond to light red, 2 might correspond to sky blue, and so forth. The number of colours and the shades they represent of course varies from puzzle to puzzle. Broadly, the larger the range of colours the more detail can be conveyed in the final image, although of course it is generally not a good idea to have a massive range of colours as it becomes harder for the solver to keep track and to have all those colours available: most colour by number puzzles for this reason won't have more than nine colours required to solve them.
And that's all there is to it! Once the entire grid is filled correctly, then a delightful image results. You can see to the right that the image of a giraffe has been revealed by a grid filled with numbers denoting different shades of brown (on this occasion a triangular grid has been used).
Whilst the rules may be simple, the solving process can be time-consuming, but of course relaxing and a pleasant distraction from the nitty gritty of daily life. If you consider all the triangles in the giraffe grid, there are literally thousands that need to be shaded in, so many colour by number solvers/artists will work gradually at it over the course of a few days. And the end result is a wonderful work of art. And creative artists may like to use different colours and shades to those suggested and see what they get with a false colour image - the results can be quite striking, and as long as the solver sticks to a given set of shades they choose for an image, the end result should still be recognisable, so not having exactly the right shades should not be a barrier to being able to enjoy colour by number.
You may have a particular image you would like turned into a puzzle - we can work with you to make this happen, or equally we can provide our own artwork and turn it into a wonderful adult colour by number puzzle for you.
If you would like to buy colour by number puzzles for adults for your publication, then please send details of your requirements through our contact form >>.
Here is the start position of a small portion of the giraffe puzzle - as you can see each triangle contains a number that is identified with a shade that the solver must then colour in appropriately:
Here is a lemur on a standard square grid:
