How to Create Coloring Pages

Kids may love coloring books from the store, but letting your child create her own coloring pages can really make her imagination soar. Coloring isn't limited to single pages for coloring, either. Together, you can create personal journals, placemats, calendars or even a giant coloring mural.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Make sure the paper tray of your printer is full and you have plenty of ink so you'll be able to print pages as you create them.
2. Visit the website of author Jan Brett to create your own coloring pages from a wide variety of pictures based on her colorful characters, such as Hedgie the Hedgehog (see Resources below).
3. Create a complete alphabet coloring book with pictures of animals and objects to represent each letter, such as a reindeer for R and a train for T. As an added bonus, this alphabet collection includes samples to help children learn how to write small and capital letters. The letters can be printed in cursive or in traditional manuscript (see Resources below).
4. Think outside the box. Create a coloring mural by choosing different pictures of animals and plants that are native to the rain forest to be printed and traced onto 3-by-6 mural paper for coloring later (see Resources below). This option is especially helpful to accommodate a group coloring project with siblings, friends or classmates.
5. Rely on the old fashioned way to create coloring pages with a plain pencil and a blank piece of paper or notepad, especially if your child has an inclination toward drawing by hand. Imagination isn't defined by a digital connection. Once he has the pencil marks the way he wants them, trace over them with a black marker to create the coloring lines.
6. Treat your child's creativity as more than just refrigerator art by framing and displaying a few of the coloring pages he's made on the walls of his bedroom.

Tips & Warnings

• Let your child browse online with you for pictures to create her own unique coloring pages or even an entire coloring book. Of course, your guidance is needed for the technical tasks of downloading and printing pages.
• Help your child learn colors and letters by making up a story about the pictures as he colors them. If you can manage to put your stories into rhyme or song, you'll both enjoy it more and it'll help make the information learned stick.