Coloring Book Update

I’ve gotten ahead in my lesson planning enough that I can finally work on my coloring book project again. This project is my passion, it means a lot to me. I got the idea in February of 2020. I had stopped drawing completely for over a decade and a half, and stiffness and poor eyesight made it hard to pick up again. Playing with my daughter’s digital drawing tablet let me zoom in on lines and be able to hit undo, making art accessible. So, I got my own.

At the same time, I hit a long term goal that had a reward attached. I once tried to start a collection of carnivorous plants and killed them all, quite quickly. I promised myself that if I got a Venus Flytrap to go into and come out of dormancy, then propagated it, I would allow myself to try again. It took almost a decade of buying them when they showed up in the fall in grocery stores, but it finally happened. In the excitement of watching my baby flytraps grow while drawing again, the coloring book idea became inevitable. The project itself justified me making a nice starter collection a priority, and has given me reason to not give up when my little garden has its setbacks.

This is why my project is going so slowly, I’m meandering through while I gain experience growing and researching the plants, as well as allowing myself time to regain my drawing skills and experiment with style and technique. It’s been frustrating how long it has taken me, but I love sitting in my little carnivorous garden sketching, so I’ve been able to tell myself that it will happen eventually. After a year with the tablet, I was able to use pencil and paper again, letting me brush off skills that have been rusty way too long. Now, I’ve finally gotten brave enough to begin adding ink. No single page is done yet, some have still barely been worked on, but many of them are to the point that I no longer have to worry about if I will be able to get the lines right, the fear of the tiny mistakes I still make are no longer enough to hold me back, and I’m able to celebrate the confidence I’ve had to make myself feel to get to this point.

A is for Axolotl

Hello, and welcome. This new blog is mostly a space for me to distribute some coloring pages I’m working on. I want to do this to educate my kid, but might as well also help you educate yours. Mostly pages will be about nature and ecology, though later there may be a retold fairy tale or two. Some pages will be a block of text with information on one side for older children, others will have simple sentences for early readers, and there will be a few for even younger audiences, like today’s page. My daughter is going to be five soon, so for now I might do a lot of things for her to start reading, and the educational part will be me talking to her about the subject.

Download PDF for “A is for Axolotl”.Download

Pages may be released a little slowly at first, I’m meandering my way through this. I can’t help it, it’s who I am. Each plant, insect, and animal species must be studied in detail for a while. I need to sketch how it is built even before doing simple drawings, I must design a species info form and fill out all the blanks on habitat, lookalikes, uses/warnings, and propagation or control tips. I’ve done this before, and I used to have notes and sketches on a variety of local useful plants I can easily forage in my area. I no longer have those files. We won’t talk about the incident that taught me the importance of backing up your data, nor will we discuss the incident that taught me to back up even more frequently.

So I’m doing this from a blank slate (again), and I want to learn more about each topic than I did before. I want to do a full coloring book on plants to grow for pollinators, one on insects in general, and one on swamp ecology. I’ve been learning to grow Venus flytraps, and have been growing plants for pollinator seed bombs for a couple of years, so these subjects are always around me, drawing my fascination. I’m setting this up so I just go around having fun being myself, taking photos of things to sketch and research, maybe toying with a little animation, and I hope to end up with a coloring book or five in the process. While I’m at it, I might as well sling some mugs and whatnot with my art printed on them, because it would be cool to earn a dollar or two. Eventually, maybe some wildflower infused candles and soaps or seed mixtures could end up in my store.

I have heard that drawing styles for coloring books should have simple lines for young fingers, so far my style might be frustrating for children who don’t like to color outside of the lines, but don’t have the dexterity for fine lines. For kids like my daughter, happy being loose and free with her splotches, the pictures will be something more intricate to look at while they enjoy themselves. I’m still playing around with style and will likely produce a variety of things, but I’m currently a little challenged at producing a simpler style. That fascination with detail spills into a lot of areas of my life.

And naturally, it’s not just for kids. I certainly plan on spreading out on the floor next to her, sharing crayons while I talk about habitat loss as we color “A is for axolotl”. I’m kind of drawing the coloring books I would have loved to own back when I was teen. It’s the whole “write the book you want to read”, for my inner child. This is gonna be so much fun.