Blog / 2023 / The Making of a Coloring Book Page

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Right now, I’m in the process of gathering funds to make a coloring book about mental health called Everything’s Fine. The Kickstarter for the project is here!

If you support this project, one of the rewards you could receive is the original drawing for one of the coloring book pages. Like this one of the image of two roses: one that’s the usual sort of rose and one that’s lacking outward thorns but that has a prickly thought bubble instead. This piece is called Overthinker, and it’s all about the problems that come with being too much in your own head.

Though all the images for the coloring book have already been worked out in a basic way, because the drawings will all be redos of paintings I’ve already made, transforming the paintings into line drawings for this phase of the project is still complicated and time consuming.

This video may just be a couple of minutes long, but, in real life, without timelapse making me look like some kind of art witch who can draw faster than a hummingbird’s wings flap, the process took almost seven hours. That includes making the drawing and then remaking it when I messed up the background. And then also scanning the drawing and editing it on my computer to remove all my light pink sketchy marks, so that it’s ready to be a coloring book page.

And I’m guessing that seven hours will be about average for turning each of the paintings from Everything’s Fine into a coloring book page. Since the book will measure eleven by eight and a half inches, some of the original pieces will need to be completely reconfigured to fit those proportions. These roses are one of the easier compositions in that sense, because they already fit those proportions pretty well, but some of the others are very tall and narrow or very short and wide, meaning that I’ll have to rethink the compositions quite a bit.

However much—or little—reconfiguring I have to do, these line drawings are a fascinating exercise for me. The paintings from Everything’s Fine all started as sketches—some more worked out than others. And then they became full blown paintings. And now they’re getting re-simplified into a form that other people can color in. It’s a distillation that forces me to evaluate and re-evaluate how these images can best communicate and heal, and I’m really enjoying the process.

I hope you’ll reserve an original drawing for yourself today!

Gwenn-Seemel-dot-com-slash-everythings-fine.