Color Your Own Folk Art Santa- a Journey

Unless you've been living under a rock, you have noticed that coloring books, in all themes and on all subjects, are available everywhere. I have several (for the Grands, but also for me): Day of the Dead, Enchanted Forest, Secret Garden, Game of Thrones, and I've ordered Lost Ocean. And Doctor Who.

I figured since coloring books are BIG right now, the stores would also be flooded with coloring Christmas cards.

I was wrong. I searched and searched and only found two sets, neither of which were what I was looking for.

So, I decided to design my own.

Here's how that went down (note: I am only posting the highlight versions, there were many in between each of the drawings posted):

The original picture- these are wooden Santas I carved in the 90's. They're my design, and they have inspired several other projects (including this needlepoint).

I used an online graphics manipulator to turn them into a line drawing so I could get the placement.

 Background erased and outlines redrawn

 More clutter erased

First try at hand-drawn embellishment

First try coloring with markers

 Image narrowed to fit a half-fold card format

 Border added, also digital stars

 Hand traced outlines, ready for more experimentation

 Digital fill patterns

 More digital fill patterns

Pencil embellishment on top of the digital fills

Colored with markers. I liked it a lot. But I decided that digital fills were wrong for Folk Art, so I went back to the literal drawing board

 As much as I like the precision of the digital fill, these embellishments are better for this design. I finally noticed a couple of perspective issues that crept in over time, and got them fixed.

Almost there.

BTW- each of these steps involved multiple printouts (and by *multiple*, I mean I probably printed out 45 different versions of the card). I used a LOT of ink over the weekend.

Time to try coloring again:

Crayons

Markers

Colored pencils

I could keep changing and tweaking, but really, the drawing is done. I am going to send this out, uncolored, as my Christmas card this year. But you all can download and color the page if you like. Please, for your own use only, no resales or commercial use.

Click on the image to enlarge. Save to your computer and then print.

Enjoy!