Thank you, Linda G. Hill, for always being an inspiration!
So, a few years ago my daughter gave me a couple coloring books and color pencils.
I played in them off and on but only was this far last spring:
I didn’t like the pre-done bits in either picture like all the dark parts in the Mandala or all the scales and shading on the dragons but decided because Linda set us to task to get busy and try. I finished (I think) the dragons. There still may be things to do but here I am now.
Besides the mandala to finish, this is the next dragon:
This one looks like a lot more fun! What do others prefer to color with? I want to try pastels or actual crayons but feel I need to learn more about the pencils. Maybe I should wait for the next picture as this is on the back of that multi-dragon and maybe the wax of crayons will bleed through?
Darswords 
Gorgeous, Dar! I love the shading on the dragons. I hadn’t thought about using pastels, but I may just pick some up now that you mention it. 😀 Thanks so much for joining in! ❤
This is going to be a learning experience for all of us!
Right? I improve with every picture I colour. 😀
To think we quit when we were kids! Well, when my kids were kids. I do see how this is a healthy thing to do for all adults! Next, I want adult swings! And slides!
Haha! Sounds like fun! 😀
Oh, and thank you!
I really like the mandalas on the black background! Totally different effect! 🙂
Thank you. It seems it should give a nice stain glass effect. But for coloring, there is very little to color. Maybe others in the book will give more to play with or maybe pencils are the right tools for this. This is a goading to get back into coloring which I love!
I’m into it 🙂
🙂
Cool dragons, and nicely colored. I agree that I don’t much like the already colored in black parts of pictures. I mostly use markers for my coloring, but sometimes pencils. 🙂
Thank you. How do you get shading with markers? And don’t they bleed through to the next page? I’d like to try. I have a few in my art supplies and nearly bought some erasable ones last night.
Well, I guess I don’t really do much shading, but I should use pencils more often. True, markers don’t shade very good, and sometimes they bleed through, other times not. I think it depends on the type of paper used in those books.
I only recently thought about shading and coloring books. I didn’t use to think about them that way, but since playing with Zentangles and seeing how fun shading can be, I thought I would try in on the coloring books. I guess it loses its relaxing quality if we start making the project harder, though. As for the bleed though, I guess we could make copies so we don’t have to worry about the picture on the other side. I did some coloring today. I’m finding I miss doing this. My daughter just turned 36 so it has to be about thirty years ago the last time I did color on a daily basis. We need this!!!!
I remember coloring with my girls, and now with my grand-kids, too. Sometimes I even buy a little kid’s coloring book to color. I have lots of the design ones, too. Oh, I love doing the Zentangles! Cool that you do, too! That’s a good idea to make a copy of the page. Our printer is broke right now, though, so will have to wait on that. There are a lot of free online coloring pages you can download too, all kinds of subjects. 🙂
I’ve been collecting the coloring books from Amazon. My thoughts were to not print them out but to freestyle draw the simple pictures and then to Zentangle them. I haven’t done it yet but now that I have all my art stuff out I may just try that soon. As they say in the Zentangle, there are no mistakes and I think it could improve my drawing skills. I would love to have some grans to color with. That has got to be such fun!
It is fun to color and do art projects with the kids. That’s a good idea, too, to freehand draw some pictures to color. It could give some good ideas to look at. For awhile I made bookmarks with my Zentangle designs on them, then left them randomly at places we went. That was fun. 🙂
What a great idea gifting bookmarks! Have you heard of BookCrossing.com? Those bookmarks would be fun to out into books you wild release!