I have a belated post to make. Two years belated in fact. It only took 6 years, but I finally have a published in print colouring book. A book that is not a collaborative piece of work.
Those of you that have followed me a while know that whilst I have mostly focused on digital art for print on demand website products, and print on demand fabric prints. I have also been creating adult colouring book pages which have been available on my Etsy store for a while as well as some individual pages that were included in a couple of physical print books that were collaborative works with others (Coloring for Daniel, and The Adult Coloring Book Treasury).
How long would it take for me to publish my own?.
But those of you who can remember when I first started colouring book pages, will also remember I was working on a big colouring book project involving fish. A project large enough to require fifty two pages of artwork that spanned a whole queen size bed.
Of course this was the first time I had ever published a book on my own of any type. It came with a lot of new skills required that I needed to teach myself. Drawing all the art work alone took months here and there, intermittent with breaks to do other work or focusing on our growing family.
Between finishing the artwork and starting to convert them to digital files I had to take a long break from work completely due to being put on bed rest. Eventually that bed rest lead to my eldest becoming an older sister, and I could work again although it took a while to be able to get back to it. Finally at the end of 2020 I had a finished book file I was ready to publish.
6 years it seems!
And so I did, on the 21st of February 2021, through Amazon and their expanded distribution channels. My First published colouring book, “The Fish Pond, a piece by piece adult colouring book” went live.
It’s not all fish, as you can see, but in fact inspired by a fish pond. Not only filled with many koi, but also teaming with Japanese native animal and plant life.
You not only have many koi to colour in this book,
But also a whole mandarin duck family.
And a variety of insects,
Also birds,
And plants.
Even the odd amphibian.
And my personal favorite (a surprise to me as in real life i am petrified of them), a Japanese rat snake.
It’s a little bit different.
I’d like to say that this book is a little bit different that many colouring books as whilst each page certainly works on its own. They are meant to work together. If you remove each page and line up fifty of the pages you make the entire pond.
Why fifty two pages then you ask? Well the front and back cover has been included as extra pages, interchangeable with the center of the ponds pages. The finished giant pond is a little smaller than the original artwork that once swallowed up our queen size bed. But at 75″ by 50″ its still rather large.
Each page also has a pretty black boarder that can be trimmed off if you want to piece the pages together. So that each panel is the same size. And I’ve included descriptions so you don’t have to hunt and guess the caterpillar or bird.
I was incredibly proud when it went live, I am sure some of you saw my social media posts and posts in the social media colouring groups. I still am to be honest. I know it was probably obvious with all the social media posts!
