Give some people a coloring book and they WILL color!
I did a little art project this holiday season like I do most years. It’s something to get me through what is perhaps my least-favorite time of the year.
This being my flickr year where I actually started to consider the camera one of my art tools, I decided to make something based on my flickr images — a coloring book. I ran the images through Photoshop and laid it out in iPhoto and hallelujah there it was, a cyber book which I then printed out on paper, thank you Kinkos. My distribution chain is always hit or miss and if I missed you I’m sorry. Hit me up and I’ll send you one.
One recipient was my SF blogger buddy, Anna Conti, and Anna surprised me by actually coloring a page and returning the beautiful thing to me in the mail. It’s one of my favorite images, “Two Trees,” a shot of Santa Monica beach looking like a desert mirage with a concrete bunker restroom in the foreground and just the hint of the ocean (or desert) in the background. And it just shows you how art can triumph over the coloring book, a genre of book I love but also have some problems with, because it teaches that you should stay within the lines.
Conti’s non-crayon coloring, which she called “an unauthorized collaboration” is a triumph of art over “stay in the line-dom.” She turned a simple scene into a beauty. And the idea that a coloring book is, at its heart, a collaboration, is a fantastic thought. Puts a whole new spin on the genre for me. Here’s my flickr set with the original photos and my machinations with them. And because I’m a blogger, I put them into a blog, night before xmas (named for what I am usually doing on that night — some project or other).
Check out Anna’s new blog look, by the way. She’s migrated to a mac host and has podcasting capability — I’m so jealous!
