Christmas Colouring Book

I'm very excited to share this project that I've been working on, on and off, for almost the whole year.
A Christmas Colouring Book!

The book has 30 festive illustrations to colour in, including some drawing prompts and discussion starters. I would say this book is aimed at children but suitable for adults. I know I had fun trying it out.

Like the other books I've produced, I self-published this book using Create Space and it's available on Amazon. The paper is matte so it's perfect for colouring pencils.

I've managed to get the book finished and printed ready for my first Christmas craft fair of the season this Saturday. To appeal to present-buyers I've put together a gift pack which includes the colouring book, a set of colouring pencils and some colour in stickers which are illustrations taken from the book.

Pretty legit I think!

I can't wait to see how they go down at the fair tomorrow!

Colour Me Magnets

I've been busy preparing for Christmas craft fairs next month and adding stock to my Etsy shop. One of the things I've been working on is these colour in magnets. If you've been reading my blog for a while you may remember these cupcake magnets. I've decided to bring them back and add some new designs to the range.

I wanted to make a set of colour in magnets that might appeal to both girls and boys so I created these monster magnets. These were really fun to design as there were no limitations at all. I could draw as many eyes, arms and legs as I wanted.

I also created some Christmas jumper designs as the festive season will be here before we know it! These were also really fun to make just because I love Christmas so much.

The magnets are printed on matte magnetic paper and cut out by hand. Felt tip pens are the best thing to colour them in with. I love the bright colours.

I created packaging for the magnet sets which I think really shows them off. I've added these new sets to my Etsy shop so if you've already started thinking about Christmas presents, or you just like colouring in, please check them out.

Colouring Books

I'm sure you're aware that adult colouring is a big thing at the moment, well the trend was apparent in my family's Christmas presents. Here's our family of colouring books we gave each other.

Mine's the anatomy book in the middle. My sister bought it for me from a charity shop, which I know because I was there when she pulled it from the shelf and I said, "That's cool! Buy it for me."

And it is cool. It's an actual textbook but the illustrations are line drawings that you can colour in. You get to colour and learn at the same time!

 I thought about going for realistic colours but then realised there's a lot of bones in the book and colouring the same whitey yellowy colour would get boring. So, blue skull? Yaaaas!

Are you into colouring? What's your preferred  medium? I like to use coloured pencils, but my sister is all about the felt tip pens, and when I was younger I was wax crayons all the way.

Colour In Dresses

When I was taking the photos of my latest up-cycled dress it was really sunny. This isn't something I'd usually complain about but it made some of the photos really bright, so much so that the dress I was trying to show was completely washed out.

Which gave me an idea.

I printed out four of the brightest photos where the dress was almost completely white and coloured them in. 

 I was able to re-design the dress.
Straps? Why not.

Pink with matching shoes? Go for it.

 

 I think this one's my favourite. I like the neckline and the green to blue gradient.

So that was fun. It's like a fashion doll meets a colouring page.

Colour In Cards

For my friend Lizzi's birthday card this year (You know Lizzi. Helped me dye my hair? Yeah, her) I used the colour-in images I'd made previously. I stuck a box of crayons to the inside of the card with an additional orange crayon so she could colour in her hair.

When I told my sister about this, she wanted one too.

Her birthday is only a couple of weeks after Lizzi's so I got to work.

I used the same method as before - which you can read all about here - and used a photo taken off Facebook of my sister and her friends all costumed up.

The picture looked weirder with the faces drawn in, believe me.

And this is the finished card after it had been received and coloured in!

My own Disney colouring pages

 Here are some true facts:

1) Colouring is fun

2) High-fiving Disney characters and trying to capture it on camera is fun

So I present to you the 'High-5 Disney Character Colouring pages' (it's a working title)

I used these photos from my trip to Disneyland last year of my friend Lizzi high-fiving, or trying to high-five, Disney characters.

Minnie Mouse was loving it. The Queen of Hearts on the other hand totally blanked Lizzi. Not cool!

I put the photos into a programme called Revelation Art. Sure, there's probably a way to do this on Photoshop but I don't have that on my computer.

I layered a blank page over the photo and used 'onion skins' to alter the transparency. Then I used the 'simple spline' tool to draw curved lines, tracing the picture.

This is the same method I used to make my Colour Me Magnets

I think these are so funny, and now I just need to take Lizzi back to Disneyland to get a full set!

Yay colouring!

Illustration inspiration

I recently found this image online. After a bit of digging I found it's by illustrator and graphic journalist Wendy Macnaughton.

I really liked the style and to try my own version I decided to use images of my friends.

(I've blurred out some of the words just because I don't know how much personal information my friends would want on the internet)

I traced the images from photos using my light box. Yes, I traced them. I wanted to get straight to the colouring and not spend ages trying to get the faces looking right. So I used tracing as a shortcut.

I coloured them in using coloured pencils.

I've never really done realistic colouring with pencils before, but i think I'm getting the hang of it.

Though apologies to my friends if you think I made your face look wonky or discoloured!

Coming out from the faces I wrote my friends' full names, their birthdays and things I associate with each of them.

Next I want to try something with more words so they're blocks of text coming out from the image, so many something with song lyrics. 

Robot craft session

Yesterday I ran the first of three craft sessions at my local mill.

First up was robots.

Here's the one I made as an example. It's arms and head moves. The magic of split-pins.

One of the kids tried to copy it exactly. I take that as a compliment.

And because there's always those kids that finish early I came prepared with some robot colouring pages that I printed from the internet. There were some leftover so I thought I'd do one. Sometimes it's nice just to colour. And I totally kept inside the lines.

When I was younger and had a day off school because I was ill I would always get out my colouring books and wax crayons. I even had a Sesame Street colouring book. It was awesome.