Books
The creation of colouring books came about by accident, I never intended to draw a colouring book. The idea started because I wanted to create a personalised piece of artwork for a Christening gift. I went about creating the name with letters that were made up from things beginning with that letter, my first letter being the letter H.
H is for Helter Skelter, Helicopter, Hen, Hippo, Helmet, Hovercraft, Horse, Heart, Horseshoe, House, Hedgehog, Hairdryer, Hamster, Hamburger.
This is the finished piece
Others saw the artwork and asked if I could create one for their children and before I knew it I had created most of the alphabet, I then received requests if I could further personalise the work by colouring the letters.
This gave my the idea to create a book, whereby you could colour the letters yourself and make your own personalised artwork. I am very fortunate that my husband is a printer and with my ideas and his expertise the book came into being.
We wanted a good quality paper, one that would take a variety of colouring mediums, we chose a 170 gsm high quality Italian paper. This paper takes colouring pencils, watercolour pencils (if not watered too much) markers ( pens may bleed through the page, but I have not yet found it to bleed onto the page underneath) Glitter pens, colourists have even added embellishments like glossy accents, and glued sequins and feathers to make their letters unique.
As a double security measure for bleed through I wanted to make the pages were perforated, this also served well for left handed colourists. The pages can be easily removed from the book and can be worked on separately which stops the pages from tearing when you remove them from the book.
Another important feature was the number of letters in the book, I hoped that others would use the book in the same way as me so I wanted to make sure that they would have enough letters to create names, the book contains 3 copies of each vowel and 2 copies of each of the other letters.
Lately I have made another two adjustments to the book, whereby I have added an index page, which lists the contents of all the letters and I have also made the book the little smaller – this is because its far more easier to source frames this size.
I’m currently working on creating extra characters for both A-Z books, I have just finished some ‘&’ signs and I’m also working on book of illustrated numbers.
