5 Easy Steps To Make Your Own Personalized Coloring Book
Looking for a sports-themed or specific type of coloring book and can’t find exactly what you want? Make your own with this simple tutorial. Every kid will love one of these DIY coloring books for themselves.
Our boys love to play, play, play sports all day until they’re beyond the point of exhaustion. They will run themselves ragged on any court, field or arena they can find. They’re constantly asking to play different sports with whomever will complete again them. Most often, their dad steps up to the plate and embraces their non-stop energy. I occasionally come in off the bench.
Engage With Sports Though Art
Sometimes, I like to give them a chance to slow down and engage with sports in a different form. Coloring gives my active boys a chance to calm down, slow the pace and catch their breath a bit (or just sit peacefully at a restaurant table while waiting for food).
Coloring books exclusively about sports exist, and I have shared a dozen of our favorite sports coloring books, but that doesn’t always cut it. My kids come to the table with a vision, an idea of exactly what they want to color. Consequently, we’ve resorted to making our own coloring books with a little help from Google.
Make Your Own Personalized Coloring Books
My kids often make very specific requests about what they want to color: a Philadelphia Flyers goalie, Mickey Mouse playing basketball, or a baseball pitcher mid-pitch. Typically, these requests arise out of some conversation about a team or sport or a recent game they watched on television.
With the wonders of Google, I can entertain a lot of these requests with a simple search for “(fill in the blank) coloring page” or “(fill in the blank) coloring image”.
I am not an attorney (so don’t consider this legal advice), but as long as you aren’t making loads of copies or using the images for commercial use, the Internet is a great place to find the images your kids want to color at home.
Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way
I like making our own coloring books for a few reasons. First, we print out just what we need so we don’t have too many pages go to waste. Also, they are small and light so they travel well in airplanes and to restaurants.
More importantly, I appreciate that creation of these coloring books reinforces to my boys the principle that you can almost always find a way to solve the problem if the solution isn’t readily available. For better and for worse, when I tell my kids we can’t buy something, they almost always respond with “Ok. Let’s make it!” (Good in theory, not always great for execution when their ideas involve complex DIY skills… ha.) Nonetheless, I’m willing to endure some lofty DIY projects or a handful of explanations why something just isn’t possible in our house in exchange for developing a resilience to the idea that obstacles can’t be overcome.
Rest assured, this is not a lofty type of DIY project. It’s really simple and requires a computer, some paper, and a stapler. Here’s how you can make your own DIY coloring books.
5 Steps to Making Your Own Personalized Coloring Book
Step 1: Search for your desired images on Google (or your favorite search engine). As mentioned above, I search for terms like “baseball player coloring image” or “soccer player coloring page” I filter for only Images which results in a wealth of images from which to choose.
Step 2: The boys choose their favorite images and I save them to my computer. After opening a new Microsoft Word document, I Insert each image as a Picture. I resize each image by dragging the bottom right corner of the image to fill the page, and then I print.
Step 3: Choose two pieces of construction paper or cardstock for the front and back covers (if you’d like a cover).
Step 4: Staple the pages together and color away.
Sometimes, the boys like to add an image on the cover. For the soccer cover page, I searched for “soccer coloring image” and found this on the first page.
Beyond just a family project, this could also be a great birthday party activity where each child creates their own party favor to take home. Each child can take home their coloring book and maybe a box of crayons or markers.
There aren’t a lot of sports-themed coloring books on the market and making your own is simple, so much more fun, and creates a personalized book in which your child can’t wait to color every single page.
Give it a shot and tag me on Instagram or Facebook @HonestlyModern so I can see your project!
