Yet More Colouring Book Pages Turned into Envelopes

     Hey, guess what – I’ve been making some envelopes recently. What have I been making them from, you wonder? Colouring books of course!

     My sister got me a nice, large colouring book for Christmas specifically for the purpose of making envelopes and I’ve finally gotten around to turning a few into mail art!

     Usually I find that the best pages to turn into envelopes are pattern ones or flowers because with animals, I might not be able to get the whole face of the animal onto the front of the envelope and it might look weird. The colouring book my sister got me does feature animals, and large ones at that, so I was a bit worried about how they’d look on envelopes but I think they’ve turned out alright.

     I picked a few images I liked from the book and cut them down a small bit to be 10×10 inches in size because I was using my envelope punch board to make them. There are 3 different size envelopes the punch board can make from a 10 inch square piece of paper so I made one of each and was lucky to find that with each one, the animal’s eye was on the front of the envelope.

    With the first envelope, I wanted to colour it in, but I’m pretty lazy and I don’t have the attention span to really colour things in properly so I just used one marker colour and coloured all but the horns and eye of the animal in to match the leaves in the background. With a yellow marker, I went around the outline to make it pop a little. As the paper is pretty slim and I had soaked it with marker, I did use a piece of white card to make an envelope liner. Just using one marker is a nice quick way to add colour to colouring book pages, I think.

     With the second envelope I made, I did work up the courage to actually do some colouring, but I didn’t feel like getting all of my colours out so again, I used one marker and was selective in the areas I coloured in. I was originally only going to colour in a small part of the front of the envelope but I got a bit engrossed and ended up colouring a lot more than I had planned!

     I think the third envelope might be my favourite – I love this panda! I wanted to colour him in some way but pandas are black and white so it felt like it would be strange to make him too colourful. Eventually I decided on a gold gel pen to colour in the white areas outlining all the black sections. It was a bit time-consuming but I think the gold looks rather nice on the fellow.

     While I was flicking through the colouring book, I did spot two other pictures I wanted to use – a dog and an elephant. I wanted to do something a little different with them, not just use the punch board again. Having different sized envelopes decorated is handy so I opted for A4 size ones.

     I wish the elephant was large enough to cover the full front of the A4 envelope – I stuck it down and then had to figure out what to do with the space left so I just grabbed my white gel pen and started doing some dashed lines (when in doubt, draw dashed lines). I thought about making an envelope specifically sized for the picture I’d  cut out but I just wasn’t feeling up to that. The dog was easier to place on the envelope as the corner section of it kinda dictated where it would go. I glued it down and just to add something else to the envelope, I outlined it with a thick black marker and also added some dashed lines (like I said!).

     So those are the envelopes I have made this time round. Who knows, to any pen pals who read my blog, maybe one of these will show up in your mail box soon!