Have you ever thought to create your own print coloring book ? Today I Draw Dragons, illustrated by Shelly Loke, is a great demonstration of how to pull off a high-quality, successful coloring book—with the help of a Kickstarter.

The Print Coloring Book and the PDFs

Shelly Loke is a freelance illustrator, but in her free time she began to draw dragons—a lot of dragons. She’d wake up in the morning, pencil-sketch a dragon, then come home from work and ink it in. As she started to create prints of her artwork, she realized it would make a great coloring book.

In February of 2017, Shelly launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring the print coloring book to life, and she successfully raised the $700 needed—plus she met stretch goals, to a total of $1,201!

Besides the print coloring book, backers were awarded with PDFs of the illustrations that they could print and color at home, and even a one-of-kind pen dragon drawing by Shelly.

Today I Draw Dragons is 8-1/2″ x 11″. We perfect bound the book with a 4-color cover on 10-pt. C1S stock with matte lay-flat film lamination. The interior printed black ink only, 106 pages on 100-lb. uncoated white stock at 284 PPI (pages per inch).

Keep at mind that we count pages, and two pages is one sheet of paper whether you’re printing duplexed or not. Shelly printed on both sides of the sheet of paper, so each illustration was on a righthand/recto/odd-numbered page, and the preceding lefthand/verso/even-numbered page facing it had the title of the illustration next to it (see image above).

Another great touch that Shelly added is the dragon’s tail in the bottom corner of the verso pages—as you flip through the book, the dragon’s tail moves!

Why Bookmobile to Print Your Own Coloring Book

Bookmobile provides custom book manufacturing; no cookie-cutter templates or trim sizes to adhere to here. We produce everything in house, and we only produce books. So the collected know-how of our experienced staff goes into every book we produce. Our minimum run is 25 copies—we could not maintain our high quality standards and breadth of options if we were only printing one copy of a book. From you, we require print-ready PDF files; our Support page will guide you on file prep and our color printing parameters.

For custom coloring books, we offer paper from 50- to 100-lb. in weight, white or natural. Most of the coloring books we print are on at least 60-lb. weight. For binding, we offer perfect bindingplastic spiral binding, and wire-o binding. Perforated paper is also available, but limited to 50- or 60-lb. white, a run of at least 100 copies, and a trim size that is 8-1/4″ x 10-3/4″ or smaller.