10 Style Challenges For Coloring Book Lovers
Not just for cliché cute and cozy books
“Cozy coloring” has taken the world by storm with overly simplistic designs that lend themselves well to practicing advanced coloring techniques and pushing the user’s creative boundaries. People come up with seriously impressive ideas to experiment with textures, color schemes, light-sources, and so much more.
But let’s be honest. The style and subjects of the books tend to be dull, repetitive, and lacking any sort of personality. There’s also a dramatic over abundance of these books that are sloppily made using generative AI.
So I decided to try some of the style challenges out in my first book, Cats Being Dicks, to see if I could achieve the same cool effects and challenges but with slightly more complex (and way more fun) pages.
I admit, I’m a coloring book illustrator, not a coloring book user, so I don’t own alcohol markers and I lack the patience a lot of people have, but here’s what I managed to make and how I made them…
First off as a disclaimer, my books, (as well as any book printed by Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing) don’t have the best quality paper. It’s not BAD by any means, but it’s not high quality meant for getting excessively saturated, so I do always recommend putting something behind the page you’re working on to prevent any bleed-through from getting on the next page in the book. A couple sheets of copy paper do just fine. You can also test your colors on this page. I literally used a two-page after visit summary printout from my doctor because yay for recycling. All of the books I create are printed single-sided to help with this issue. Plus this way you can cut them out and hang them up or whatever you want to do with them
The materials I used:
- A mixture of Tombow and Lyra water based markers. They’re not super high quality or awesome at blending like alcohol based markers, but they’re less expensive, they’re what I had, and they do the job. I have a bunch of colors and find it’s helpful to have a bunch of the lighter more pastel options because they can be layered to create so many other color variations and basically give a blending effect.
- A white prismacolor premier colored pencil. Any brand will do. I actually probably would have done more colored Pencil work in this experiment because I love them as a medium and they’re so versatile, but I have some joint/connective tissue issues in my hands and they’re a bit more strenuous on me personally.
- Posca acrylic white paint pens. I mostly like the fine tip one because the paint comes out much more opaque and sharp, but the other tip ones are cool too for a certain level of transparency and you can smudge them with your finger to sort of blend it easier.
- Artistro acrylic paint pens. Honestly any brand will do. Again, Posca is a good brand. These were given to me for free as a demo, and are decent but there’s nothing particularly unique about them
- Zebra brand Mild-liners. Hear me out - these are highlighters but they come in a pack of different colors and are more pastel than regular highlighters, but still very neon and vibrant. Not meant as an art supply per say, but they’re one of my favorite things to use.
The challenges:
1. Embroidered
Materials: Markers, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen
Technique: To achieve the embroidered effect, every item you color will need 2 versions of the color, one being darker than the other. Fill the area with the lighter one, divide the item in evenly spaced parallel lines, and then using the darker version of the color, draw some whispy “thread lines” coming up from the bottom of each line segment. Using the white paint pen, do the opposite with whispy thread lines coming down from the top line of each segment. Keep your lines loose and uneven both in length and spacing to give an authentic light-shining-on-thread look. Going around certain sections with thicker black marker in a sort of scribbled way with some random “frayed” threads can further lend to the effect.
2. Neon sign
Materials: Black marker, acrylic paint pens in various colors, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen
Technique: Using the colored paint pens, trace over the lines making sure there is color visible on both sides of the black line. Use different colors for different objects in the picture. You can repeat colors on multiple objects, just try to not have two objects that are the same color touching each other so that they’re easily differentiated in the end. Next, go through and color all the white of the page with black marker. Depending on the paint pen and it’s opacity, once you’re done with the black you may want to go over the colors a second time and overlap the black a little bit to see if it gives more of a blended look. Finally, with the sharp white paint pen, carefully trace over all the original black illustration lines, being careful to not cover too much of the colors.
3. Two markers
Materials: Markers
Technique: The challenge here is to literally just use 2 markers. I think it works best if they’re complimentary colors and both lighter value markers so that you can get some versatility by layering them on themselves to get slightly darker values or layering over each other to create a new color.
4. Two complementary colors
Materials: Markers, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen
Technique: This was basically the same as the 2 marker concept but I didn’t quite limit myself by marker, just color (by using 2 different shades of purpley-blue as well as the white acrylic pen to get a really dramatic effect since you can only get a light purple to go so dark no matter how many layers you apply).
5. Monochromatic(ish)
Materials: Markers, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen
Technique: The challenge here is to stick to one color in different values (plus a white paint pen) and still get depth and make it pop. One of my markers was a little more purple than pink because the cap was misleading, but you get the idea. Again you can utilize layering of the same marker to make it darker.
6. Stained glass
Materials: Markers, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen, white colored pencil
Technique: For this one the idea is to divvy up each object with straight black lines into geometric chunks and fill them with different-but-close colors. You can then add white highlights with acrylic to give it a bit of a shine. I suggest tracing the black lines of the illustration too to match the lines you’ve added for consistency. Since this page has multiple glass elements of the vase and window, I went over those sections with the white colored pencil so that the colors shine through but look sort of foggy. You can always add acrylic pen over colored pencil too for a more solid white like I did with the water surface and highlights in the vase.
7. Multiple light sources
Materials: Markers, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen
Technique: This one honestly didn’t turn out great in my opinion, but something fun you can challenge yourself to do is work with light sources. If there’s a window or a lamp or the sun or whatever in the image that can be your obvious source. If there isn’t anything illustrated, you can make one up and pretend your scene is in the dark and being illuminated by a light source out of view. If you REALLY want to challenge yourself, try having multiple light sources and try to figure out how they would interact with the objects and cast shadows.
8. Cover the black lines
Materials: Markers, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen, mild-liners
Technique: I only did this to the background since I wanted some contrast between the cat and the setting, but here I used the mild liners to fill in the background (which blend together beautifully in a very surprising way for highlighters) and then traced over the black illustration lines with the sharp white paint pen. You can also use this technique to alter the original illustration and get rid of things you don’t like about the page, just note that ink over top of acrylic will look different from ink on raw paper, so you may have to white-out a bunch of already white paper if you want it to look seamless.
9. Greyscale + glowing rainbow
Materials: Markers, fat tipped white acrylic paint pen, mild-liners
Technique: Having a few different shades of grey markers enables you to create a rich greyscale page with depth and contrast. To make it more interesting though you can pick a particular section to have in color (or for a real pop, use the mild liners like here where I tried to make the water look like a glowing glass of magic). You can add a glitter effect by using regular vibrant markers and also white paint pen to do some little dots. I also used the white paint pen over the black lines again inside the glass to make the transparency effect more for the carpet showing through in the background.
10. Cosmic gummy
Materials: Markers, fat tipped white acrylic paint pen, fine tipped white acrylic paint pen, mild-liners
Technique: This one is kind of crazy and other people have done a much better job but basically imagine the objects in your page are made of bright rainbow gummy candy. You would have a basic color but also shadows of that color in a darker value, bright highlights, reflected lights, slight transparencies, and colors sort of bouncing off and reflecting on each other. I used the fat tipped Posca to create large semi-transparent highlights, and also the sharp tipped one to add little stars and dots for a sparkler look. I think I also threw some mild liners in here blended with the regular markers. It was a bit chaotic but honestly, just have fun with it and experiment!
Some other ideas I’ve seen people do but just haven’t attempted myself include making the whole page look like it’s made of pixels, making it look like ceramic tiles, trying to get a metallic texture, making things look realistically fuzzy, doing a sepia tone like an old photo, and so much more. The only limits are your imagination.
In conclusion, I don’t think you need the super simple basic cozy books to pull off some really cool and unusual coloring effects and have a lot of fun.
I currently have illustrated 5 coloring books that are all about this level of detail, and they would all be great for practicing these effects.
I’ve also illustrated a sequel to Cats Being Dicks (Tails Through Time) which is a bit more detailed and could be a really fun challenge to try these types of effects for the more advanced color-er. There are flip-through videos of each book on their respective Amazon pages if you’d like to see the insides and gauge for yourself.
You can find all my books on Amazon and at select retail spots in Colorado. Feel free to reach out for more info, and of course if you try any of these I’d love to see the results!