Today is a very special day for you Imagining Happenings blog readers! I’m going to give you access to an unlisted video on my channel and a preview of an initiative I’m really excited about doing but am not quite ready to launch into the world just yet. It’s called Color Me Stress Free, and you can here more about it in the video below.
Color Me Stress Free is a mental health and art therapy initiative that I started as a club while in college. Everyone I talked to thought it was an innovative and inspiring idea, but after I graduated I no longer had the easy outlet within which to operate it so it fell untouched in the dusty corner of my imagination. However, as I’ve built my YouTube channel over the last 4 years, mental health and creativity spring up in my vlog topics again and again because I have a passion for helping people overcome their trials and find happiness in every day life. I do that on my channel now (iIMAGINEblank), but I’d love to reinvent Color Me Stress Free to further that mission.
The goal in bringing Color Me Stress Free to the online video world would be to create an engaging online community featuring live stream coloring sessions, user submitted artwork, community driven and written short stories that I’d illustrate, and animated mental health awareness videos. Ultimately, it would inspire people of all ages to be mindful of their mental health and diminish the stigma associated with mental illness. However, it could also bring awareness to the benefits of having a creative outlet in life since many people find it can be therapeutic or an important part of self-care.
At this point, Color Me Stress Free is a conglomeration of ideas. I can imagine how I want it to function and the kinds of content I want it to include, but to be as successful and inspiring as I’d like it to be, it needs a lot more than just me working on it. I’m a one-woman-band on iIMAGINEblank most of the time so I’m limited in how much content I can realistically produce on my own and the types of content I’m capable of producing. For example, I’m not an animator (I wish I was!) so I could write and do voiceover for the fun mental health awareness animations, but I’d need to find animators to collaborate with. Similarly, I’d love to feature artists and musicians by coloring their work during live streams and using their music as a soundtrack for community coloring page round-up videos. Essentially, I’m proposing a new channel or branch off of my own brand, but I need help finding the resources and collaborators to make it happen.
I’ve put off making Color Me Stress Free a real thing because when I launch it, I want to do it right! But I also don’t want to wait forever. It has the potential to be awesome, but sometimes I fear that I have lots of good ideas but very little time to commit to them and make them a success. So I just don’t try most of the time. I let my ideas fester in the back of my mind, aching and crying to be let out. I don’t want to do that with Color Me Stress Free. So I applied for Vidcon’s new Creator Mentorship Program where if you’re selected you get 10 to 15 minutes with a leader in the industry to pitch your idea and get feedback and advice. I’d love that! My general problem is that I don’t know everything. I don’t even know where to look to know everything I need to know to be successful, and I get discouraged before I’ve even looked in half the places I know to look. I’m really hoping to get selected for this Mentorship program because although it’s only 15 minutes, one-on-one time with an industry leader would be invaluable to me as a digital media creator in general. I’d love to know how an industry leader reacts to my pitch to compare to all of my friends that I’ve pitched to so far. I want to know if it would work on the large scale I’m hoping for.
But right now, I want to know what YOU think. You get a special pre-preview of my idea, and I’d love feedback from you. As I ask in my video, would you want to be a part of an initiative like this? Can you think of ways to incorporate artists into this initiative? Do you think people would actually want to color with us? Do you think it has the potential to change the way we view mental health and illness?
Let me know below in the comments!
i IMAGINE (blank) 
I think this is an excellent idea to get rid of stress. I usually prefer music to cool down, but I have never thought of coloring as a stress reliever. I’m going to put this idea into practice when classes start. I would love to be a part of the initiative, but I don’t know how to contribute.