Coloring Crafts

Drawing with a crayon is probably the first craft babies try, once they can sit up, and certainly before they can walk. The fascination of seeing a squiggly line, where before there was nothing, entraps a lot of us at an early age. Hopefully, the blank space we're having the kids fill with new art is a sheet of paper fastened to the lower half of a living room wall with masking tape, not the wall itself. Butcher paper is terrific for this and can also be ordered online, if you don't live near a local store that carries it. The 36" width comes in rolls from 100 feet to 1,000 feet. Narrower and wider widths are available.

When we've mastered actual coloring books full of cartoon characters or cute animals, we go on to something more demanding. But drawing our own pictures "from scratch" usually isn't as easy as it looks. Something called composition often trips us. In between those two stages are "training" kits called paint-by-numbers. We've probably all tried those, somewhere along the way.

A variation to painting by the numbers would be pencil-by-number kits. These sets have lovely choices of designs: land and sea, the seasons, pets, sports, wildlife, to mention a few. We might have also tried painting on velvet, when black velvet art was so popular. Velvet picture boards are something a little different. Created with black velvet lines on them, the artist paints or pencil colors between those lines to bring out often stunning designs.

Coloring Crafts Have Many Outlets

Kits for model airplanes and cars, door hangers, blank "coins" or playing cards often need coloring talents to finish them. Imagination is the only limit to how things should look when done. A great idea is blank crossword puzzles that can be colored before being broken apart and shuffled in the box.