Tacoma artist Jennevieve Schlemmer creates, markets adult coloring book

For Jennevieve Schlemmer’s first-ever Kickstarter campaign, she didn’t do too badly. Over a four-week campaign — just ended last week — the Tacoma artist raised $5,294, nearly $700 more than her $4,600 goal to fund “Fortuna,” a self-published coloring book filled with delicate drawings of an imaginative world.

In the process, she found out a whole lot about the trendy new phase of coloring books for grown-ups — and the difference between traditional and online art funding.

“Kickstarter is very personal,” said Schlemmer, before the campaign had ended. “If you don’t get it, you think, ‘Oh my god, half of the Internet is seeing me fail.’ You look at all the other books that succeed and wonder why. It’s a popularity contest. It’s also humbling — you have to go to your friends and say, ‘I need your help.’ (Whereas) if you don’t get a (traditional) grant you just move on.”

But Schlemmer — a Tacoma artist who paints, draws, sculpts, does fiber and tile art and has created numerous public art pieces — is nothing if not versatile. She decided early on to embrace the online world and what it offered independent artists: a loyal following.

“The future is social (media),” Schlemmer says. “I want to embrace that. My art is unique, it’s a bit odd, offbeat. With social media, I can put my art out there and find my people. It’s hard to do that with traditional galleries.”

So, when she got the idea to create a coloring book, the idea to fund it through Kickstarter was a natural. But by then the world was awash in grown-up coloring books like “Secret Garden,” which skyrocketed British author Johanna Basford to international fame with over 1 million copies sold in 14 languages.

“I had already started sketches a year ago, before that came out,” says Schlemmer. “Then, bam! Now there are hundreds of those books. Powell’s in Portland has an entire wall full of them. Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon.”

Undaunted, the Tacoma artist kept going, even buying Basford’s book “as research.”

She decided to make her book different from the endless flowers, leaves and mandalas of other books, instead creating a storyline, moving the reader through a magical land from ocean to forest to a city on the back of a turtle, populating it with slightly quirky animals such as deer with flowers for antlers. She also took note of her own coloring experiences — “in ‘Secret Garden’ the spaces (between lines) are just so tiny” — and committed to crisp images first drawn by hand, then “cleaned up” on Photoshop. Each of the 40 drawings took around eight hours.

It worked. “Fortuna” raised 44 percent of its goal in just 10 days, and by the end, Schlemmer had added stretch goals and extra goodies for backers. Now, the book is also on sale through her website, her new production company shortlegstudio.com, and Amazon, and should be in local stores soon.

But Schlemmer isn’t stopping there. She’s already begun work on a Web comic, turning increasingly to drawing as a medium to avoid the waste and expense of bigger supplies, and liking the instant and simple nature of it.

The big irony? While Schlemmer likes coloring, she failed it at preschool.

“I didn’t do it the way they wanted,” she says.

This story was originally published November 24, 2015 at 7:47 AM with the headline "Tacoma artist Jennevieve Schlemmer creates, markets adult coloring book."