Back in 2012 I was bit ahead of my time publishing a colouring book and it didn’t sell particularly well. Since I’ve been having fun colouring on my new iPad I realised I could be colouring in my own characters too!
The digital version is still available so I saved some images to my iPad and decided to try colouring them in Adobe Sketch. I much preferred Procreate app initially but now I’m a huge fan of Sketch too. They both have pros and cons though so I’ll be using both for different types of artwork. I love that I designed the cover to be coloured in too.
The best thing about digital colouring in is that you can use layers so it’s easy to try out different colours and brushes without ruining the page and you don’t have to stick to the lines! My favourite way to colour is to ignore the lines and do big washes or pencil hatching and then erase back to the lines. I also like removing the outlines after for a softer look. The donuts were done mostly with coloured pencils and the fruit with watercolours.
My colouring book is more accurately an activity book as it leaves a lot of blank spaces and opportunities to add your own details. You can see I’ve done all my donuts slightly differently and my space page is barely recognisable from the original!
I had so much fun with this and you could never really get these effects on the actual page. If there’s any interest, I can add image files to the digital download so you can colour them digitally yourself.
I liked the donuts so much, I made them into a repeat pattern which is available on lots of cute products at Society6 and Redbubble.