Passive Programming–Turn Your Library into Coloring Sheets!

Branding is important for your library, and if you have an interesting looking building, it can easily become part of your branding. Feel if you know what the building looks like and can recognize it, you’re more likely to return to it. So coloring sheets! Kids always need them, and don’t you want your library on someone’s refrigerator?? That’s some great advertising. This is a little similar to the library map coloring sheet I did a few months ago.

So there’s a few ways to do this–there’s apps and there’s photoshop suites. Those will work but feel that my way will work out the best for you. So here’s how I made this:

First, take a photo of your library. Make sure it’s a clear day and has high resolution. That’s the easy part.

Next use the photoshop suite that you are most comfortable with. I used Pixlr E since it’s free and I somewhat know my way around it. I used these steps here to make this:

Couple things to keep in mind:

1.) You could just stop right here at this step. Boom, you technically have a coloring sheet done. But I’m not really in love with it. It looks a little busy with all of the shrubs, and the tree looks weird, and there’s a stop sign right in the middle of my picture. Little kids might not be able to color those parts the best.

2.) You can use your favorite photoshop suite, if don’t want to use Pixlr. Just Google “turn photo into coloring sheet with [insert photoshop program]” and you’ll be able to find instructions that help you.

So anyway now that we have the raw coloring sheet done, it’s time to do some drawing of our own! I used Publisher for this part, but you can use something similar to it. All I did was just trace over the photo by adding some black lines and rectangles.

This way, we can edit out things we don’t like. Make sure your line size is uniform–here I used 2 pt. For the roof I used the “Line” in the “Shapes” tab. Click on a point on the roof, drag it over to where the line ends, then click again, a nice straight line is instantly drawn for you.

By making it a raw coloring sheet, your photoshop did most of the hard work for you by getting rid of details and reducing the building to a bunch of lines. Now all you have to do is go over, and trace the lines you want to keep. It doesn’t have to be perfect; in my final draft I left out a bunch of details and got rid of some windows. But it is recognizable as the building, and that’s all that matters.

When you’re done with all your lines, you just delete that raw coloring sheet and then you’re left with your simple and beautiful coloring sheet. The whole thing took me just a little over an hour, but I do know how to use Publisher pretty well.

Hope yours turns out great! It’s a great thing to hand out and farmer’s markets or any other kind of outreach you do! Let me know if you need help!

All blog entries are for educational or personal use.  Please credit the original author if reblogging or posting ideas originally found on this site.  LEGO^® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this site.