Coloring Clutter

In real life, Durell Godfrey’s East Hampton home is positively brimming with cheerful clutter—shelves stuffed with shoes and boots and art supplies and baskets and books, walls slathered with paintings, posters, drawings, photos, even a collection of vintage thermometers.Old-fashioned canisters perch atop the kitchen cabinets; neatly folded quilts inhabit an entire bookcase; Post-Its and crumpled paper and colored pencils overtake an upstairs desk; empty boxes, including several slept in at various times by a cat named Dilly, rest on a long worktable downstairs.

Philosophers or shelter magazine articles might debate where art ends and clutter begins, but Ms. Godfrey has already answered the question, using her home as inspiration for an adult coloring book, “Color Me Cluttered.” It is due to be released on December 8 by Penguin Random House, whose publicity describes the adult activity book as “a relaxing escape for pack rats and neat freaks alike.”

The walls of her sunny home “stood still for me” as she sketched them, joked the artist, who worked as an illustrator for Glamour and for books on fashion and cooking, among other things, and today is a contributing photographer at The East Hampton Star. In addition to the rooms she inhabits—and where the recent presence of her late husband, the art director John Berg, can still be felt—Ms. Godfrey found other subjects for her coloring book drawings—in hats at the LVIS thrift shop, towels at the local Y, her first apartment in Boston and a later one in Manhattan—“everybody’s trip to the garden center,” “a yard sale I wish I could go to” and some “places I’ve kind of been.”

Ms. Godfrey said her years at Glamour made her comfortable with creating interior spaces. “I could bang that out with a tiny little pen and no glasses,” she said, pointing to a black and white drawing of a pretty little room that dates from 1972 and whose white spaces are only slightly smaller and thus less color-in-able than the ones in the new book.

Last Thursday night, at the publicist’s request, Ms. Godfrey sat down to color in three drawings from the book, to show what they looked like in various stages of completion.

“I was scared to death, because you have to make choices,” she said, advising future colorists to organize pencils by hue and test them out before taking the plunge.

The color-inner needs to “figure out the architecture of the picture,” Ms. Godfrey said, using the example of her drawing of plants spilling from a hatchback after a springtime garden center shopping spree. One might start out by spotting a geranium in the picture and deciding, Okay, a geranium is red, or spying a terracotta pot that needs to be rust-colored, if you decide to color it realistically.

“Once you start doing it, you absolutely get into it,” said Ms. Godfrey, adding that she started the publicist’s project at 7 p.m. and kept on going until she realized it was 12:30 a.m.

As they’ve grown both popular and plentiful, adult coloring books have been touted as a kind of art therapy for stress and anxiety reduction, with some even focusing directly on mandalas and lessons in mindfulness.

But a rack of drying socks or a room filled with half- and fully-potted plants or shelves lined with toy planes or abandoned coffee mugs with no human in sight?

Ms. Godfrey was coloring in one picture, of wrapping paper rolls and winding ribbon spools, when she decided to select Tiffany blue for a gift box, meaning she had already made a decision about the people the inanimate objects imply.

“I want to draw people into the living experience,” she explained, “who these people are … getting to know the people in these rooms.”