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Grab your crayons, it’s coloring time

373 points| kirillzubovsky | 6 years ago |colorabl.es | reply

59 comments

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[+] puranjay|6 years ago|reply
I love this site. On mobile, its such a pleasant experience to use it. It's clear what the site is about and where to get what you want. From the fonts to the padding, everything seems to fit. A great case study in form + function.
[+] robbiejs|6 years ago|reply
I agree, beautiful website. I'm viewing it on a desktop, and it's the first thing I thought.
[+] jeremymcanally|6 years ago|reply
Awesome! I'll have to share these with some friends who have kiddos at home right now.

I've been doing something similar at http://colorthisthing.com. Skipped today for a day off, but I've been posting one everyday since I started. Fun way to keep my brain occupied since most of my other artistic outlets are shut down right now.

[+] AnonC|6 years ago|reply
Thanks for sharing this. I browsed a few posts and liked it. I thought it’d be nicer to have an archive page that shows all your creations (with clear thumbnails and links to download). It doesn’t have to be infinite scrolling. It could be a page with 20 posts each or so.
[+] dvno42|6 years ago|reply
Thanks for this. Just finished coloring today's image. I haven't colored anything in at least 10 years. Great way to unwind a bit.
[+] fenwick67|6 years ago|reply
It's interesting to me that someone made a website this complete and an instagram page for a total of... 4 coloring book pages?
[+] mackenziechild|6 years ago|reply
Hah yeah my intention was to create a lot more, and maybe have some other artists contribute some... But never got around to it unfortunately.
[+] ravedave5|6 years ago|reply
Really nicely designed site, but there's only 4 pages total?
[+] mackenziechild|6 years ago|reply
I intended on creating more, but haven't had time yet. These 4 took probably like 10 - 20 hours each.
[+] emsign|6 years ago|reply
Four aren't enough? How fast are you at coloring???
[+] mobilemidget|6 years ago|reply
been colouring with crayons a lot more since quarantine, daughter loves it, so I'm happy. And just one 'wall/crayon' incident... took me a good 20 minutes of cleaning :)

bought 500 sheets of A3, people luckily not buying that yet to wipe their asses :)

[+] steve_adams_86|6 years ago|reply
I find melamine foam, like Mr Clean magic erasers, makes removing assorted drawing implements from walls a lot easier. It'll even remove pen and pencil. I add a little soap and just scrub away, rinsing frequently.

You have to be careful because it's an abrasive and some wall surfaces might not like it. It seems fine on the paints I've cleaned, though.

[+] Nexxxeh|6 years ago|reply
I recently had an incident with a roll-fed plotter.

It's not printing. Message onscreen complains of incorrect paper size. Tell printer to print anyway.

It starts dumping the roll through, completely blank. Cancel just hangs. Power button does nothing. 10m of roll gone already.

Fuck it, I'll just manually roll it backwards onto the roll. I pull the power plug. I plug it back in.

First thing the plotter does is cut the paper off. Fuck.

TL;DR: My nieces and nephews are not short of paper for drawing on.

[+] pjs_|6 years ago|reply
I'd love to see a GAN coloring book generator.
[+] jerf|6 years ago|reply
Almost anything you could want from a GAN coloring book generator can be found on Google/DDG image search with "coloring page $NOUN". I mean, you can find almost anything that way: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+coloring+page&t=ha&ia=image... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=slug+coloring+page&t=ha&iar=images... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bed+coloring+page&t=ha&iar=images&... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=teleport+coloring+page&t=ha&iar=im...

To save parsing the links, that's "hacker", "slug", "bed", and "teleport", all of which have perfectly reasonable hits.

I literally can't think of a halfway plausible coloring page that isn't covered that way. (Kinda thought I'd win that on "teleport", but... yeah, nope. Slim pickings at one result, sure, but that's still one reasonable result!)

Of course, you're pretty much writing off copyright laws in the process. How much that bothers you is up to you.

[+] chrisa|6 years ago|reply
I've worked on this a bit! It turns out to be quite difficult (at least it was for me)

One of the big problems is that GANs can't generate files at a high enough resolution to make great coloring pages.

I then tried to make a neural network that would generate SVGs directly, which turns out to be really tricky too.

One thing that might work is to generate low resolution pages with a GAN, and then use an image to svg converter to make high resolution versions... maybe I'll try that next :)

[+] amelius|6 years ago|reply
The "Monster Mash" page looks like it was generated by a GAN.
[+] dchuk|6 years ago|reply
I realize I’m about to ask about the aesthetic of an art website so cut me some slack:

I love the visual style of this landing page. Anyone know of a bootstrap (or other framework) theme with a similar style? Or a name for this style?

[+] teapourer|6 years ago|reply
I don't know of an exact theme, but I think you would be able to get a similar effect by using a standard landing page theme and tweaking the fonts / colors a little. Use a round typeface, double the font size, and choose vibrant colors.
[+] bsenftner|6 years ago|reply
I don't know the link, or it is even still up, but I met a woman back in '01 that put together a coloring book site, internationalized it, and was receiving $4K a week in Google advertising revenues. She had sections for 80+ countries international holiday, a often a few of whomever was their country's founding people. When I last saw her, she was hip hop style covered in gold.
[+] kirillzubovsky|6 years ago|reply
Have you read "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" ?

Apparently in the early days of Google Ads, some clever people made large sums of money. Some were scammers, but many were just very clever opportunists who found a way. Sound like this woman figured it out!

[+] wardnath|6 years ago|reply
Happy to see work by Mackenzie Child. His design for developers course was really helpful when I was trying to build a webpage from scratch with just an engineering background.

[1] https://mackenziechild.podia.com/design-for-developers

[+] jmccaf|6 years ago|reply
I am interested in the story of how is personal name or brand is same as MacKenzie-Childs, a home decor brand popular in my hometown Upstate NY. Their items often have a white-black checkers : https://www.mackenzie-childs.com/
[+] themodelplumber|6 years ago|reply
Did anybody else just screenshot that Snack Attack image and start coloring it on their computer? Pretty fun...
[+] jahn716|6 years ago|reply
Well, there went 15 minutes of my productivity... thanks (not sarcasm)!
[+] StavrosK|6 years ago|reply
It's not working for me. I click the A4 PDF on the Monster Mash page and it takes me to a fullscreen Dopplr ad that I can't do anything on other than sign up for Dopplr.
[+] mackenziechild|6 years ago|reply
Try again. I'm not sure what was causing this issue, but I added new links and it should be working properly now :)
[+] gambiting|6 years ago|reply
Stupid question - if I wanted to import those into an iPad app and colour them there(using an Apple Pencil or similar) - what would be the best way to do that?
[+] chrisa|6 years ago|reply
I just tried it with Procreate - the files are PDFs, so they can't be brought into procreate like that, so I had to download on my desktop, convert the PDF to an image, then transfer it to the ipad and insert it into Procreate that way.

Hope that helps!