Adult colouring in books are all the rage at the moment. If, like me, you enjoy the simple pleasure of colouring in and are creating some ‘masterpieces’ why don’t you turn these into cards as well.
I have always enjoyed colouring in and remember fondly back to my younger days when my grandmother used to send me from England a series of colouring books based on Medieval Costumes. I spent hours looking things up in books and deciding what colours to use. Even now I try (probably too much) to make my pictures look as natural as possible. Part of the latest craze is to just let yourself go and use whatever colours and patterns take your fancy at the time. I’m trying to do this a bit more – perhaps I should get designs that are a bit more abstract.
I currently have a lovely book called Birds and Butterflies by Alice Chadwick which has images that run across a full 2-page spread. I couldn’t bring myself (yet) to spoil the book by colouring in it (yes, weird I know – I will eventually but for now I want to keep it nice) so I photocopied the pages so that I could try some different colour combinations. The book is too big to be able to fit on photocopier even if I was intending to reduce the image to fit a page. So I had to select just a part of the image and weigh up between getting as much as possible of the design (but smaller) or a larger image of a smaller piece of the design. I went for as much of the design as possible this time, extending across the middle of the page, and fitting onto an A4-sized sheet.
I have coloured some of these in using coloured pencils and am quite pleased with the results. I scanned my pictures and then printed them out 4 to a page on glossy photo paper, knowing from previous experience with my Christmas Cards that these images were the perfect size to use on a standard A5-sized card. I cut some of them with straight edges and used deckle-edged scissors to give a wavy design on others; then experimented with putting them on different colour card combinations, enjoying the way the use of different colours can draw your eye to different details in the design so that sometimes if you don’t look carefully you would assume that the cards were totally different. These are a sample of the different cards I have made from my ‘masterpieces’:
It is a fun and simple way to create cards and perfect to create gift-boxes of cards to give away as presents. You can decorate your gift box with one of the designs or however you like. For this one I used Decoupage.
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