What I Know--{Kristen Duke}

My dear friend Kristen is stepping in to help me out today, which I am not opposed to at all, since she has such creative ideas. She's going to share with us how to create personal coloring pages.
So here it goes..

My daughter is LOVING this! She loves to color and she loves pictures of herself our family, so this is a great combo. This sketch is a photoshop technique, so sorry if you don't have photoshop (I have heard picnik can do this). Should work on even the most basic photoshop version.

Pull up your image in photoshop, then go to Filter--Sketch--Photocopy and adjust the detail and darkness settings. Keep the detail setting as low as possible while keeping the outlines of the image. The detail here is at 8 and the darkness at 5. The darkness setting needs to be dark enough to see the outlines you want to keep.
Clean up image by adjusting the levels. Go to Layers--New Adjustment Layer--Levels and increase the shadow levels (first arrow) until you are happy with the darkness of the lines. Then decrease the highlight levels (second arrow) to clean up the white areas of the picture. Print it out in black and white and voila!

Before:

After:

You can make your own coloring book as a gift for your kids!

Here is a sketch from an image I did and "colored" a few spots in photoshop and framed. Fun, huh? And very simple.

Thank you Kristen! Such a fun, unique idea!

And for those of you who don't know about Kristen's fabulous series going on now, check it out, I have learned so many new ideas for using pictures around my home.

Ps--Check back tomorrow for a really fun giveaway!