A 108 Mile Ranch resident has turned a lifelong love of doodling into a series of colouring books.
Sally Bartsch is the mind and pen behind Mojo Doodles and Designs, a company that’s begun making its mark with a series of abstract colouring books for all ages. Bartsch said she has never really considered herself an artist but has always loved to doodle.
“My books are a bit of a different style. There are no rules to it. Some people might say I don’t know where to start, and it’s like you know what, you just pick your favourite colour and get started,” Barstch said. “It can be as crazy and wild and bright or dull (as you want it to be).”
Bartsch grew up on a farm just outside of Viking, Alta., to a hardworking father and an artistic mother. It was on that farm as a child that she first began to doodle on any blank paper she could get her hands on. She remarked that she used a spirograph set to make her early abstract drawings, a set she still has to this day.
Rather than cultivate her artistic skills as an adult, however, Bartsch instead chose to pursue a career in bookkeeping and human resources, which she did for several decades. Throughout that time, she remarked that she would idly doodle when on the phone or in between meetings.
“I never really was an artistic kind of person. I was always kind of a school book person, an analytical person,” Barstch remarked.
In 1999, Barstch and her husband, Gerald, decided to move to the Cariboo to semi-retire, settling down in 108 Mile Ranch. Gerald started his own fly-tying business, which Barstch assisted him with setting up when not working for Interior Health (IH) in the health records department.
After retiring early from IH, Barstch said she was looking for a project to take on. Initially, she was looking at potentially writing a book or some other project, but could never quite find the inspiration.
That changed when one day she and Gerald had a friend from California over for coffee who noticed some of Barstch’s doodles on notepads around the phone. He told her that people down in the United States were selling pictures like hers and suggested she consider doing the same.
While initially sceptical, Bartsch said she started to switch from doodling on notepads to full-size pieces of paper whenever she and her husband watched a TV show or listened to a podcast together. She noted that it would help her focus on whatever they were watching.
“I was doing it originally on just loose-leaf on blue ink pens and every night I’d do one while we sit there listening to stuff,” Bartsch explained. “Then my husband says, ‘you know what, people are making colouring books, why don’t you do something like that?”
Bartsch said she started doing some research on what it takes to make a colouring book and watched several tutorials on YouTube. Once again, however, due to a mix of the explosion of AI colouring books online and other projects, she let the idea lie for a little while longer, but did switch to doodling on larger pieces of paper using black markers.
That changed in 2023, however, when she lost her father on Boxing Day. Returning home to attend the funeral, Bartsch said she felt bad for her mother and wanted to find a way to support her from afar. Recalling how her mother used to paint murals on her childhood home, Bartsch decided to send her some of her doodles.
“She just embraced them right away and got right into it. She uses acrylic paints to do them, which is amazing,” Bartsch said. “I really enjoy the drawing. I never even thought about someone colouring (my doodles), let alone myself. Once she started doing that… I thought you know what, I’m going to commit to doing this.”
Bartsch said that while initially the idea of self-publishing seemed like a daunting task, she likened it to eating an elephant: step by step. She focused first on doing research, learning how to use the program Canva to design the book herself, figured out how to publish via Amazon and chose a name for her new company. She noted she went with Mojo Doodles and Designs in part because of how she feels the mojo when doodling, but also because she had a cat for 15 years whose name was Mojo.
When it came time to publish, Bartsch said she had 45 drawings she deemed suitable for the project. Rather than make one large book, however, she decided to split it into three so it was less overwhelming for prospective customers.
“This way a person can actually do all 15 of them, feel like they’ve completed it, accomplished it, they have their own little work of art and they can kind of keep it as a keepsake,” Bartsch said.
Once she published her first colouring book in June of 2024, Bartsch said she wasted no time in publishing the next two in the following months. Since then, she’s sold them primarily at Creative Magic Art and Hobby and at the South Cariboo Farmers Market. She noted she enjoys the community of the market and getting face-to-face feedback from her customers.
“I do have a number of people who, when they speak to me at the market, discover not only its hand-drawn and it’s not a generic colouring book, but I didn’t use any AI. They kind of light up then, I’m quite happy to see that.”
Some of the feedback that’s touched her the most, however, is from members of the Cariboo Brain Injury Association (CBIA). Mike Dewing, the founder of the CBIA, has bought some of her books and told her it’s good therapy for stroke survivors. Barstch noted that, as someone who has lived with post-concussion syndrome, she knows how important finding ways to heal your brain is.
“When you think too much about things, all of a sudden it can just go. With the colouring books, they can just pick a thing and do that for now,” Bartsch said. “I think the drawing was a therapy for me, too. Doodling can create new neural pathways, which I think may have been helpful for my recovery.”
Looking to the future, Bartsch said she is considering doing another set of colouring books and potentially creating some notepads or placemats using coloured versions of her doodles. She noted that for her, the sense of accomplishment she gets from completing a project is the most rewarding part of what she does.
“It was a lot of learning, a lot of research, and it was something I had been very interested in back in the early 2000s, but there was just a limit to what a person could do,” Bartsch said. “Now with Canva, with Amazon, you don’t have to be of a pre-printed, published background. It’s open to anyone who wants to actually do it.”