How I Created a Rude Adult Colouring Book from my Art Without Using AI

 

My Adult Colouring Book - How it Came to be

Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence is now part of our every day lives, at least in the media we consume. To mark the release of my "Fill Your Own Fanny" colouring book for grown ups, here's how I tried to take advantage of it myself. But as you will see, it's not for everyone.

 

Back in 2020, I created a free download of my artworks as colouring pages to entertain my locked-down followers called “Fill Your Own Fanny”. Whilst it was terribly popular (well, it was free duh), I really didn't enjoy the creation process much at all. It just took SO long and I would always rather do a painting or suchlike. My plans for publishing a full book rapidly hit the bottom of my to do list.

 

Cut to sometime in 2023. I had a huge portfolio of artworks and it was time to do something practical with them. Few people were buying my mugs, so I decided to think of other avenues and the colouring book project came back to mind. If I made pages with funny titles, the humour element of my outrageous titles might shift a few from the shelves, especially over Christmas as a rude secret Santa.

 

I now had an iPad, so I pulled out some of my original studies for the pictures to work with. This was actual digital illustration, as in I used a digit. My finger. If it's good enough for kindergarten pupils, it's good enough for me. I did four or five and they came out looking alright. “I'd colour these in” I thought to myself “...if I had the patience”.

 

I quickly ended down a YouTube rabbit hole to forward plan how I would ultimately publish the book on Amazon. The videos were all very straightforward and informative but one thing became clear; It is a now a lot quicker to create colouring pages using AI.

 

The other take-away was that I had been drawing my new versions in the wrong ratio. All of these colouring books were published in portrait ratio and my paintings were landscape. Whilst I like the idea of being different, I felt that trying to break consumer habits might go against me in the marketplace. I would have to ditch all my hard work and start again.

 

“Hey, that's okay.” I convinced myself “AI is going to do most of the donkey work for me.”

 

Boy was I wrong. It's probably improved now, but at the time neither Dall-E nor Midjourney (AI image generation products) seemed to be able to grasp the concept of creating images as pure line art without shading let alone render a human hand with less that eight fingers.

 

It was literally time to go back to the drawing board. I had reformatted the layouts of many of my paintings to portrait ratio and even created some new ones especially for the project, but outlining was a chore. There was always something or someone better to do.

 

Reorganising my life at the beginning of the year meant I had some quality time on my hands. What I had to do was change my mindset. This wasn't WORK. It was a relaxing way to spend my time. Possibly even more mindful* that the actual colouring itself.

 

With a brand new iPad I continued in earnest. Seizing any downtime to whip out my digit and draw around the lines (note to self: start a gofundme for an Apple Pencil). I would take advantage of any spare moment. The page of Tits Around Fat Balls was created while waiting for a brain scan in A&E!

I hope you agree that my own creations are far better than anything AI would come up with, then or now. Had I gone the Midjourney route I could have had more books in my series than the Mr Men, but the human touch would be lacking from them all.