Best Coloring Books Ever

There are millions of sites with coloring pages and books online. You can choose from line drawing pictures, posters and line art drawings to print, all for free or at very low cost. You'll discover everything imaginable if you search for free coloring sheets, from simple shapes and picture pages for preschoolers to popular and hip designs and compositions suitable for older kids and teens. There's also an ever-expanding collection of printable adult coloring design sheets with artistic drawings that are interesting to color in or use as patterns and templates for other arts and crafts.

Choose from pages and books that are ready to print without any special software or registration requirements, or play interactive digital painting games on your smart phone, tablet or desktop computer.

If you're looking for more complex artist-created drawings and patterns to color in, you can join special art clubs or buy line art posters, coloring books and large format murals. Or better still, get more of your friends into this creative hobby that's become wildly popular by hosting a coloring party.

All illustrations on this page are my own work and featured on my web sites.

Find unique printable months of the year art pages at Pastiche Family Portal in the calendar pages sectoin.

Lake Champlain Coloring Page (below) is one of many in a pinned set of coloring pages for teens and adults.

Green Mountains and Lake Champlain landscape scene poster to color or use as a digital stamp is one of a series of line art New England vacation scenes you can print out and use for your personal art projects. There's also a Maine coastal lighthouse and a "Lobstah" Boston Travel Poster.

Or, if the tropics are more to your liking, try this Hibiscus Aloha Poster with the traditional Hawaiian welcome greeting written in bubble letters line art along with a gigantic lei flower outline drawing.

This set also includes a number of intricate word art designs, mandalas, and ornate drawings in black and white.

Hard to Find and Rare Favorites for Adults and Teens

Explore this excellent selection of hard to find adult coloring books: fantasy art, street art, manga, op art, zentangles, graffiti, psychedelic patterns, alternative art, mandalas, abstracts, geometrics, heavy metal, punk music and more - find rare or hard to find teen and adult themes in line art books waiting for your creative touch.

Be advised that some of the books you may discover using a search on Amazon could feature subject matter that may not be G-rated.

Flying flowers for Earth Day, Spring, Weddings, Mother's Day

Butterfly pages are among my favorite nature pictures to draw. Butterflies are popular for Earth Day, weddings, birthdays and Mother's Day coloring activities.

This printable butterflies coloring page happens to be one of the most popular downloads at my web site. Many people use this particular design to make their wedding coloring books, digital stamps and embroidery patterns.

Find it at Pastiche Family Portal: http://parenting.leehansen.com/downloads/coloring/...

This butterfly poster is free for noncommercial use - click the link or image to open a new page to view and print the PDF sheet.

Flower power paisley designs in a groovy wavy love bubble art design - challenging and fun! Just a few of the unique 60s style posters available to print and color in.

The sixties are all the rage again, and boomers are discovering a new way to chill out and be cool with easy art color in designs.

1. For starters, this collection of books, pages, posters to color and coloring crafts is huge, and the list gets larger every month.
2. You won't find the usual cartoon character and commercial pages in this collection.
3. You'll find original drawings, unique coloring pages, fine art drawings and adult pictures to color in this collection of the very best coloring pages and books on the planet.
4. All the "adult" links to printable pages are rated G. They're billed as adult simply because they're more challenging and artistic than the typical color book pages you'll find with a simple Internet search.
5. Coloring or art therapy is a wonderful method for making anxiety work for you, and for reducing stress. Art therapy works wonders for helping senior minds stay sharp.

Here's a secret tip: teens and older kids enjoy adult coloring pages as much as little kids.

Classic realistic and abstract line art, prints and engravings in black and white make fantastic complex free art for colorists. You can find many drawings and print reproductions in the public domain to download and print.

The original print for the humorous illustration above - The First Smoke - (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [reproduction number LC-USZ62-47899 ) is from the US Library of Congress, and is one of many public domain images archived in the Popular Graphic Arts Collection at the LOC.

Flickr is a good source for finding illustrations offered as public domain images or drawings licensed for commercial use. Some offerings at Flickr are new pictures; others are scanned images from old engravings and handbills.

Check the public domain archives of government web sites and photo galleries to find digitized copies of historic pictures in printable formats. Many old newspaper and book illustrations stored in public archives such as the US Library of Congress or the National Wildlife Service offer images can be used as is or traced to create your own line art.

Other sources where you can search for public domain line art and images include openclipart.org, clker.com and selected artist galleries at deviantart.com. Not all work at deviantart.com is public domain, but you will find some along with many artist-created line drawings you can download to color in for personal use.

Coloring masks are appealing to kids as well as to adults, both for making a mask with any choice of colors and also to use as mask templates and mask making patterns. You can easily use a line art mask as a craft template to design a sewn fabric or felt mask, or if the coloring page is very fancy you can use it to create a face paint design.

All images copyright Lee Hansen

I draw my own art and coloring pages, but you don't need to be an artist to make your own excellent coloring pages. These links will take you to web pages with instructions for how to create your own coloring pages from photos, clip art or by using special online tools to combine and print images that result in your very own unique coloring books made from the coloring pages you've designed.

Learn how to create your own coloring pages from photographs, or put together personalized books for special occasions like weddings, special events or birthday parties.

Choices in my recommendation lists range from simple pictures for preschoolers, stitchery artists, quilters and crafters up to elaborate wall-size group activity murals and fine line drawings that will challenge your patience and test your eyesight.

Don't let the outlines limit your creativity! You can do so much more than fill in the spaces of a coloring book picture. Think of this collection as your starting point to a wonderful world of creative expression and artistic fun, no matter what your age.

There are thousands of ready-to-decorate pictures, posters, word art, banners, greeting cards, masks, mandalas and kaleidoscopic art to color on the best sites and blogs. I created this page to help you find them and avoid spammy sites and stolen images.

Mindboggling kaleidoscopic patterns are challenging to color, and even more difficult to draw. When I create a design with this type of dizzying patterns, I prefer to use my computer to do the spinning and mixing - sort of like a digital spiral art machine. I create the original line art, then I use my morphing filters to repeat, warp and overlay the designs until I get an interesting design that has plenty of complicated shapes.

If you're a child of the Sixties, or a fan of that era, then you know that the humble and roomy Volkswagen bus is an iconic symbol of alternative lifestyles, hippies and the peace movement.

Color in your own designs on this realistic drawing or peace out with brilliant flowers, rainbows, butterflies and mushrooms.

1. Free line drawings are just the thing for kids and adults to use as a starting point for their own masterpieces.
2. Think of coloring books as creative design resources for all sorts of crafts, sewing and creative design. Use coloring pictures for scrapbooking, paper embroidery or paper piecing, card crafts and applique.
3. Free coloring book collections online are organized into cool themes like Wild West, Pirates, Tropical Vacations, Holidays, Posters and Mandalas.
4. Coloring Pages Print Fast! They're simple drawings and you can just point, click, and print or save - there's no need for special software or programs. And you don't need a color printer!
5. Incredible Selection and Variety - not "the same old stuff" that's on every other free coloring site - cartoon characters or copies of someone else's copies of coloring books. All these links have been checked out and evaluated for uniqueness and good coloring page quality.

Design Your Own Art Hobby Books or Gifts

This is the DIY coloring book method I suggest to brides who want to create wedding coloring books to give as favors or who hope to keep kids attending their wedding happy and quiet during the rehearsal or reception.

The simplest way to make your own coloring book is to print out and assemble pictures you love in the order you like, then put them into a booklet, folder or binder. Print out free coloring pages and collect them in a binder or staple the sheets together to make a book.

If you want to create your very own coloring pages and designs to color, follow the ideas in these links below.

Markers are fun for coloring or to add accents to pictures you color with colored pencils. There are many different types from which to choose: thin tips, wide points, brush markers and blendable markers.

Alcohol markers offer you many possibilities for sophisticated color mixing and blending. Watercolor markers can be combined with brush strokes or thinned with water. If you choose markers for your artwork, it's a good idea to insert a piece of card stock and sheet of vellum or waxed paper below the page you're working to protect the sheets below.

Stained glass design pages feature a special style of illustration for colorists.

The elements of the artwork are broken up into segments like stained glass windows and the outlines around the individual shapes are printed with heavy black lines. Many of these unique art books have pages printed on one side of heavy vellum paper so that you can color them in with markers and when the pages are held up to the light or affixed to windows you get a beautifully translucent stained glass effect.

If you want to print out a stained glass style design to color, load up your printer with artists' vellum paper.

Read the Terms of Use - Respect Copyright

NOTE: Many of the resources we recommend in this article state that items on the respective site are free for personal use; some artists or copyright owners may require registration and/or payment to use their images. Others may only require a link or other credit for any use whatsoever other than personal, private projects.

It's your responsibility to determine the legal use of any graphic resources suggested in this story. We recommend resources for you to check out and enjoy for personal use.

Always be sure to check the terms of use for graphics or photos you find in books or online. If you use graphics, photographs or anything created by another person for any purpose it is your responsibility to check terms of use and to respect copyright laws.