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| The front cover of my coloring book (Order A Copy Here) |
There are a few things I'd like to say about the experience of creating this book. To get things started, let's take a trip back in time to my zine publishing days....
Back in the mid to late 1990's, I published a zine called The Armadillo Express. For those of you who are not in the know, the word “zine” is short for “magazine”. Zines are self-published, generally have small circulations, focus on specialized/unconventional subject matter and rarely make a profit. I published mine when I lived in Houston, Texas and it largely focused on my “fish out of water” experiences while living in the Lone Star State.
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| The front page of the November-December 1996 issue of The Armadillo Express |
Publishing that thing was fun! As I typed the articles on my computer for each issue, I’d occasionally print out some of the pages. I’d examine every paragraph and illustration with a highlighter and a ballpoint pen close at hand so I could make edits. Then I’d head back to the computer and make any corrections that needed to be made. This process would repeat itself a few times until I ended up with something that was reasonably finished. I’d bring a printout of the entire issue to Kinko’s, make 20-30 copies and mail them all out. Many of the copies would be sent out to friends and family and the rest would be sent to other zine publishers in exchange for copies of their publications. The process of creating it, from the initial writing of all the articles through to mailing of copies to all of my readers, was very satisfying for me. Knowing that this thing would, potentially, entertain other people was thrilling! It was like a drug without a hangover.
Why am I talking about all this in a blog post about my coloring book? It may be obvious, but in case it isn’t, the experience of creating it was very similar to the experience of publishing The Armadillo Express back in the 1990's. I spent the better part of the past three years just creating the drawings. Many of them began as sketches in one or more of my sketchbooks.
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| Some of the original pencil and marker sketches that were eventually included in the coloring book |
I’d open up scans/photographs of these drawings in one of the art making apps on my iPad and then fine tune them digitally. I’d occasionally print hard copies just to see what edited illustrations looked like on paper and maybe color a few of them in.
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| My cat, Stella, "critiquing" potential coloring book pages |
When I started plugging these drawings into Canva, an online graphic design application, I had to determine what order the drawings would go in. Some of the drawings were very detailed while others were more minimally designed. I wanted to mix up the order of these drawings so that the more detailed and less detailed ones were evenly distributed throughout the book.
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| I printed copies of each page and spread them out on the living room floor. This helped me plan the order of each page in my coloring book. |
Eventually, I uploaded the manuscript and the cover design to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and ordered a proof copy. Holding that proof copy in my hand gave me goosebumps! It felt the same as holding that stack of printed copies of my zine after printing them all out at Kinko's when I lived in Houston. This thing that I spent so much time working on would, hopefully, soon be in the hands of many other people and, also hopefully, they’d get a kick out of it.
So…. Now that this project is complete, what's next? While there are a few big project ideas bouncing around in my head that I’d like to work on at some point, I’m going to put those on the back burner for now. In the short term, I’m going to spend some time on a few smaller things:
“Go Analog” for a month. While I’ve really enjoyed creating digital art in recent years, I’ve found it worthwhile to set my glowing screens aside every now and then and go back to creating with analog tools. Maybe I’ll paint something on canvas again. I might even participate in Inktober - a month-long daily drawing challenge during October where I draw a picture every day based on various drawing prompts.
Maybe I’ll set up a still life and draw or paint from observation. Maybe this will be a time for the next evolution of The Strangers to take place or maybe I’ll explore other themes and subjects entirely. I’m excited to see where this experiment will lead.
Take care of some “Artistic Housekeeping” in my online shop. In addition to this blog and Instagram account, I have a shop on Redbubble where people can purchase prints, stickers, coloring pages and various other products with images of my artwork on them. It’s been a while since I uploaded anything new to my shop, so I think I’ll spend time doing just that.
Create some kind of online portfolio for my art. A couple years ago, I wrote about my conflicted feelings about using social media to share my art with the world. I wrote that, “Asking all of you to go on to social media to see my art sometimes feels a bit like asking you to go into an art gallery filled with second hand smoke to see my art. Sure: You'll get to see some (hopefully) cool things but you'll have to endure some yucky stuff along the way”. I wanted to find other ways to share my work with people online. This blog was my first attempt at doing this. Creating a portfolio website would be another way. I’m not sure where I will go to do this. I’ll likely find some “free” platform out there at first to play around with at first. I'm going to spend some time looking at how other artists out there are showcasing their work online to get some ideas.
That's all for now, folks. Take care of yourselves!
- Brian
P.S. Here are a few extra things for you:
1. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy of The Strangers Coloring Book, you can follow this link. I’d love to see photos of your coloring results! You could email them to me: brianwcreates@gmail.com
2. To learn more about who or what the Strangers are, you can read more about them here.
3. There are two drawings below:
- The first one is a digital drawing that I created a couple years ago. The look and color scheme was inspired by a picture of a blue lobster that I saw somewhere online.
- The second is the coloring page version of the same digital drawing.
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| New Bug/Lobster Stranger 7/28/2024 Digital image created with the Sketchbook app |
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| New Bug/Lobster Stranger (Coloring Page) 6/2/2026 Digital image created with the Sketchbook app |
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