Made It: DIY Coloring Pages

Hello! I've been enjoying the adult coloring trend, which I previously discussed in this post. I'd mentioned buying a page-a-day calendar, which has a 3"x3 3/4" design to color in. Here's a recent design, which has a kaleidoscope effect:

I also bought a coloring-page calendar for the kitchen, which has much bigger designs. Consequently, they took much longer to do. Luckily I bought the calendar about three months in advance, so I had time to fill in the images before the new year began. Sure, I could have just worked on the pages one month or whatever in advance, but that would have meant taking the calendar off the wall to do that. I figured it would be less hassle in the long run to just get the whole thing done before we began using it. 

Anyway, it looks pretty nice on the kitchen wall, as you can see below:

It's great to color in others' designs, and there's certainly loads of coloring books out there, but I thought it'd fun to try my own designs. Since I also enjoy rubber stamping, I wanted to use them for my first DIY coloring page efforts.

I decided to start with some of my larger-scale rubber stamps, just to experiment with design placement:

Detail from the second piece:

Yes, the designs on both pages are a little rough around the edges, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time on my initial effort. I've got lots more rubber stamps in my studio (like all the ones shown above, many were cheap secondhand purchases), so I can experiment with many more images. 

And since I also do a lot of papercrafting, I can use my "coloring pages" when creating greeting cards, collages, etc. 

Other hands-on possibilities include stencils, the vintage Spirograph kit I bought years ago (to make up for not ever owning one as a kid), and, of course, drawings. And I haven't even explored any computer-generated design possibilities, as I'm rather low-tech in that area. 

This DIY activity doesn't mean I won't buy any more adult coloring books; I'm just trying to see what I can come up with on my own.

Edit: here's another example of my DIY coloring page efforts: (I drew in the stems with a fine-tipped marker)

Not bad, I think - at least it looks somewhat more like what you'd see in a commercially-produced coloring book. Or at least I can tell myself that! Still, it was fun to use some lively colors on a cold, snowy day.