Behind the Coloring Books
I created the coloring books to encourage people to start coloring again.
Crayons are not just for children! The crayon companies would be shocked to learn how many adults admit they still color with crayons. Crayons are appropriate for anybody at any age. The product may be marketed towards children, but that does not mean only children use them! Many people who have seen my artwork share with me that they still color with crayons to relax after work. And that is how I got started with color crayons myself. You do not need to be an artist to start coloring. If you can hold a crayon, then you can color! With practice and a little discipline, your crayon drawings will get better and better.
“Every artist was first an amateur.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The coloring pages included in this book simply require you to color over the page. All the shading is completed already. Your challenge is to choose the colors to color the drawing. Since the shadowing is included, you can chose any color and the shading gradations will come through the color. In other words, the gradations will make the color you chose the correct shade for the drawing. Feel free to add layers of crayon to add more nuances to your drawing. For example, after you color an apple red, you can add other colors of red such as maroon, mulberry and bittersweet.
I encourage you to frame and hang the drawings you create from the coloring book. The paper I include is the SAME paper many of my pieces were first created with. When other people see what you are doing, it may inspire them to start coloring too!
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Kristina Nelson
7 Reasons To Re-open That Dusty Crayon Box
1. You can draw anything with a crayon. The secret is to know you can do it in the first place. If children knew the art possibilities of color crayons, they would keep coloring past adolescence ¬into their adulthood!
2. Crayons are affordable. They are one of the most economical art tools in the world. Paints, pastels and good colored pencils can be expensive, not to mention the canvases and art papers that go with them! One can buy literally hundreds of crayons without ruining one’s monthly budget.
3. Crayons are readily available in stores all over the world. You do not need to worry if you run out of crayons or out of a certain color. If you ran out of all your crayons, a quick visit to the neighbor’s house would be all you needed to re-stock. And your neighbor would not mind because crayons are so cheap.
4. Crayons keep for a long time. If your children are now grown up, you may have noticed after all these years the crayons they left behind are still perfectly usable.
5. Crayons are not intimidating. Most people have already colored with crayons before. Therefore, it is one of the least intimidating mediums for people to start drawing with again. This makes crayons an art tool most people can relate to.
6. Crayons are an almost universal medium. If you walk into any elementary class in another country, there is a big probability that you will see crayons in the classroom.
7. Crayons are full of color. This may be obvious, but I include this to remind people that no complicated mixing is necessary with crayons – as opposed to paints for example. All the colors are there in front of you in the box – you simply choose which color to start coloring with!
