Sometimes the best projects begin as collaborations. In the past year, JaegerThing1 (now aged 3.5) has been asking me to draw cards for her so she can finish them. Mostly, we’ve put them on her friend’s birthday presents but we’ve also starting doing a few holiday cards, get well cards, and cards for friends who have moved away. She likes to finish them by doodling completely over the text with markers and putting as maky stickers on the front as she can fit. You might think I’d have taken a photo of these to post but I didn’t becaue I hadn’t had this brilliant idea yet. So stay tuned for a photo.
But now, to tell you about my brilliant idea. I had been trying to come up with a downloadable file project for my Etsy store that involved creative kid crafts. I’ve been making cards for my daughter. Hmmm. Why not make a bunch of half-finished cards to post for other kids to finish at home? Am I brilliant (don’t answer that)?
There are a lot of coloring pages and coloring books out there created with that comfortable and easy-to-do hard black outline. I didn’t want to do that for multiple reasons. Primarilly, I wanted the card to look kind of like the kid drew the entire thing themselves. It’s a bit of a cheat, but it looks a lot nicer to me than that hard black line. Second, when I was a kid, I HATED coloring inside the lines. Â Without that hard line, you can color right over the outline it you want. And you can change it’s color.
Yes, the other kids made fun of me because I wasn’t neat and pristine with my inside-line coloring. I still remember standing on a chair in the hall outside my second grade classroom to help color my team’s craft-paper Halloween pagent backdrop, and my classmates demanding I stop because I wasn’t doing the nice neat horizantal line coloring they all were doing. I was totally messing it up. Ok fellow classmates, lessons learned. I don’t always follow the rules. I still went on to get a degree in scenery design after that. But I digress.
Third, you gotta get a gimmick! So Coloring Cards were born. I’ve started with a couple of autumny cards and will be making more for the winter holidays. I’ll be doing these for a very long time. If nothing else, I’m getting the illustration practice and learning what you shouldn’t attempt to do with a crayon (I mean on PAPER! I didn’t put the crayon up my nose, that honor goes to my one-year-old). Look for birthday cards, Valentines that work with Avery tear-off’s, and Thank You notes among many others I plan to post in the coming year. I’m currently offering cards on the same one-time purchase with and without inside greetings in case you want it blank inside. And you can print out as many as you want.
If you have any ideas for cards you’d like me to start for you or your child (or cards for holidays that I might miss like a Diwali card), let me know. If I decide to make them, they’ll be added to my store at the same low price ($.85!) as all of my other cards. To make the card, simply download the file to your computerand print it out on a letter size sheet of plain 8.5 x 11 paper. Fold the printed page in half from top to bottom, and then again from side to side. Go!
Visit the coloring cards section of my shop by clicking here:Â https://www.etsy.com/shop/MishkaJaeger
Happy Halloween!
