DIY Coloring Book (from photos!)

I like to draw and color.  I have white tablets for doodling and coloring books for adults with wild, challenging designs.  I was content with them until I saw an advertisement on a cereal box saying they had a website that could transform your photographs into coloring pages.  But, it cost me money.  This set me off on a quest.  See, I wasn't willing to pay anything or download any software off the internet in order to do this.  But, I thought it would be really, really fun to color my own pictures.  To make my own coloring book. (And I was right, too!)

Matt, Josh, and Jeramy playing slide whistles which the boys had bought on the occasion of Matt's birthday many years back now.

In the end I found a website called befunky.com which suited the bill.  For free they allow you to upload photographs from your computer or the web and alter them with a number of effects.  To create coloring pages I use the Sketcher option found under the Artsy tab on the left side of the screen.  There are options to tinker with the amount of detail in the sketch which I play with until the images comes out like I'd like.   I then save them to my computer and print.  And its all free and requires no registration or anything.  I like that.

Here is an uncolored one for you to see:  Matt and his onions.

In this way I've created a very special coloring book for myself with photos from road trips with Matt, family barbeques, birthday parties, mountain adventures, concerts, and so on.  They are really fun to color.  So much so that I hardly use my coloring books for adults any more.

If you like to color, or have kids that do, I highly recommend this DIY coloring book idea.  It fun to make and even more fun to color.

Oh, and I guess I could add that befunky has all sorts of other editing features like pointillism, fish eye, changing the colors,  red-eye removal, cropping, etc.  Oh, and making people look like cartoons.