What was once a staple of the trippy 1960s and early 1970s is now a really fun children's activity:  coloring fuzzy posters! 

I stumbled across these one day in a dollar store, looking for a cheap notebook.  Not only did it do the trick for holding the notes I needed to take, but it actually was a lot of fun coloring in the cover and rediscovering one of my favorite childhood pursuits.  Then a friend and I came across some really fun designs one time while on a car camping road trip, and bought a few to have something to do while we sat around our campsite at night.  Turned out to be the best five bucks we spent the whole trip!

So, even though I'm an adult, I still love to color and for whatever reason, fuzzy, velvet coloring projects have a space in my heart!   

• If the picture or poster is mounted on a piece of cardboard in the packaging, I leave it attached while I am still coloring it. This makes it easy to carry around, keep the poster from getting bent and lets me sit down just about anywhere I want and color.
• I use my own markers. Sure the posters come with their own, but why use just five or eight colors when you could be using dozens or a hundred?
• I try and color from lightest to darkest so I can go back over spots and change colors or add details. Light colored markets won't show over dark, and tend to pick up the dark color which ruins them. By coloring from light colors to darker ones, I can go back and change how I colored something or even add more texture and shading.
• If you want to try and avoid smearing any coloring or gettign ink on your hands, you'll want to color from the center of the poster working outwards towards the edges.  Or if you have to rest your hand on an area that is already colored in, put a blank piece of paper beneath your hand, making sure to leave the area where you are coloring open.
  

Chances are you're thinking "but wouldn't you just hang a fuzzy, velvet poster up on the wall?"

Well, maybe. I can color faster than I can make room for new art and now that I'm not in college, these don't quite go with my decor. However, I've found a great use for them: book-covers!

When I get a velvet poster that's medium to large, and I finish coloring it in, I most-often make it into a book cover. I've got lots of journals and notebooks. As an artist and writer, I'm just used to keeping something paper-ish with me to write on and often like to collect blank books for that purpose. But then once you have more than a few of them, you need to be able to tell them apart. My fuzzy posters are perfect for that!

The finished posters are easily folded around the notebooks and really go make for some eclectic book covers.  Got kids in school who have to put covers on their textbooks?  Give a fuzzy poster a try!