“I will not draw in math class. I will not draw in English class.”

Roy Henry Vickers vividly recalls his Grade 2 teacher telling him to write these sentences on the blackboard. What he drew in those classes was lost to time, until that same teacher came to his gallery in Tofino, B.C., and revealed he was always drawing boats. “I guess it was always part of my nature to pick up a pencil and draw,” says Vickers.

When Vickers got older, he received paint-by-numbers kits, which he loved. Following the instructions to create beautiful images left him with a sense of wonder. But becoming an artist wasn’t Vickers’s dream for his future; it was joining the RCMP. That dream would go unfulfilled when his RCMP medical test revealed that Vickers is partially colour blind. “When I told my art teacher he said, ‘No wonder your colours are so bold. You paint what you see,’” Vickers recounts. “My early paintings were paint-by-numbers. I would draw with a pencil, as I always do, and figure out the colours like a paint-by-numbers.” He would mix the colours in 35-millimetre film canisters, small black squat tubes with grey tops, then take the canisters filled with paint and make his “paint-by-numbers” work.

Vickers has published a number of books featuring his work, including the First West Coast Book series and the Northwest Coast Legends series, but now he has created a book of his iconic art for others to fill in. Inspired: A Roy Henry Vickers Colouring Book (Harbour Publishing, out now) contains 42 pages depicting the beauty of B.C.’s northwest coast, from eagles to rivers and landscapes. His artwork is influenced by his father, a fisherman of Haida, Heiltsuk, and Tsimshian ancestry, his mother, a teacher of mixed European heritage, and all of his ancestors.

“They are part of me. They are in my DNA. They are in my spirit,” Vickers says of his ancestors. “Inspiration comes from the Latin word ‘inspiritus,’ which means the breath of God giving us breath. When we create from inspiration, it’s greater than ourselves. It’s greater than all of our teachers. It’s bigger than me. When I’m finished, and I look at [a piece], I actually can’t believe I did it.”

What Vickers draws inspiration from has varied over time, but the response to the inspiration remains constant: “The feelings are always the same. It’s like they start at the top of my head somewhere, they go down the back of my neck into my nervous system, down through my arms and out through my fingertips.”

Click here to download a colouring sheet from Inspired.

When Lucky Budd, Vickers’s longtime collaborator, archivist, and project editor for Inspired, approached him about creating a colouring book, it was this visceral response that let him know this was a great idea.  

Budd met Vickers on Remembrance Day 2011 to start work on his memoir, and the two have been collaborating ever since. So sharing the idea for the colouring book, which came to Budd in a dream, was par for the course. “It was around the end of December, and I woke up at 2:30 a.m. with the idea fully formed,” recalls Budd over the phone. “It’s crazy to me that we’ve gone from an idea in December to it being on people’s tables within six months. It’s very exciting.”

All of Vickers’s collaborations with Budd, which total 13 titles to date, have been published by Harbour Publishing, a relationship that formed after Budd brought Howard White, owner of Harbour, the idea for their first collaboration, the picture book Raven Brings the Light, in 2012 and White jumped at the idea of showcasing Vickers’s stunning artwork. The book, released in April 2013, was a national bestseller, with the first edition selling out in five days. And it was the number one bestseller in all of B.C. in 2015.   

The process of deciding which pieces to include in Inspired was a team effort. “Every time [Budd] suggested something I said, ‘Yes, that’s good. That’s perfect.’ We were inspired by this idea that there are going to be lines on a page and people are going to take colours and put them where they want to put them, and many of them might even go online to see what I did.”

Vickers views those lines on the page as filled with silence and story. “Silence is the place where inspiration comes to you, and storytelling is the ancient way of teaching among our people and most Indigenous cultures around the world,” says Vickers. “So, as a storyteller – which is really what I am as an artist – I’m creating images inspired by these stories that are part of my life, or part of someone else’s life who’s shared their stories with me.”

Roy Henry Vickers: Christopher Pouget.

Interior image excerpted from Inspired: The Roy Henry Vickers Colouring Book by Roy Henry Vickers. Copyright 2025. Reproduced with permission from Harbour Publishing.