My newest book Artfully Amazing Dinosaurs just dropped on the virtual shelves of Amazon on August 8, 2019. This activity book is my second title in a series of maze books for kids… and adults too!
I absolutely love this book. This hand drawn book is filled with original dinosaur mazes for kids and their parents or any adult who is still a kid at heart. There are large and lumbering Brontosaurus, toothy T-Rex and his cousins, dinosaurs that fly through the air and swimming dinosaurs navigating prehistoric seas. Sometimes the animal outline is the actual maze while other pages feature circles, squares or random shaped mazes with the dinosaurs as accents. My previous coloring books gave me the inspiration to combine coloring page elements along with maze puzzle games, all on one page, for a unique designer activity book for kids of all ages.
After I finished Artfully Amazing Animals last spring, I began a followup which was based on all things Ocean, from sea life to boats and sunken treasure. I was three quarters of the way done with the pencil work when God whispered in my ear “Dinosaurs”. I looked around, chewed on my pencil a bit and thought yes, dinosaurs are awesome. That will be the next book after I finish Oceans. God wasn’t having it. “Dinosaurs NOW”. And that is why I put aside the nearly completed Oceans illustrations and began working on what was to become Artfully Amazing Dinosaurs instead.
If you are not familiar with my coloring book style, I draw everything the old fashioned way, by hand and on paper. I need the physical paper because there is much erasing and fiddling and going back over lines before I ink everything. I don’t think my creative juices would flow the same way if I was drawing on a tablet. Once the dinosaur mazes are inked with my trusty ultra thin Sharpie Pen, I scan everything into the computer and clean up each page in a graphics editor. I don’t clean it up TOO much because I like that hand drawn feel which makes the books a little more personal, as if I drew them just for you… which I did.
If you think solving a maze puzzle is mind bending, try creating a maze from scratch. The fiddly factor is huge when creating my coloring books but doing these mazes is doubly so. First I sketch the basic elements and then the main section lines for the maze bit. From there I map out the winning path and close off sections around it before adding the dead end or looping paths throughout the rest of the maze. I love doing it but sometimes my brain short circuits after hours of fiddling – I’m fairly certain there are visible sparks coming out of the top of my head – and I have to take a break.
As with my previous publications, I created a companion page as a free printable maze game to celebrate the publication of Artfully Amazing Dinosaurs as my gift to you. There is a Plesiosaur swimming with fish, a carnivore dinosaur peering into the water and a couple of prehistoric bees flying in the corner. Share this printable dinosaur maze and coloring page with your kids, your friends and print one out for yourself too.
Artfully Amazing Dinosaurs is available to purchase right now on Amazon and if you and your children enjoy it, please leave a good review. The easiest way to support your favorite independent artists is to leave a positive review along with word of mouth recommendations to friends and family.
Artfully Amazing Dinosaurs is not restricted to any one age group, as most children’s books are. I believe that kids vary in their abilities and interest levels regardless of their actual biological age. When adults color, some like to work with tiny lines while others prefer to color bigger spaces for blending effects and shading. Kids aren’t that much different. If you sit two 6 year old children down side by side, one may still be in the scribble all over the page stage while the other kid is already interested in making careful color choices and staying inside the lines. I judge neither, as long as everyone is having fun. So I have designated this book “Fun For All Ages” – parents can decide for themselves. So, whether you are 6 or 96 or somewhere in between, I hope everyone enjoys solving the mazes and coloring the pages of Artfully Amazing Dinosaurs, my second maze and coloring activity book.