How to Make a Coloring Book with FREE Art - KDP Self Publishing

in this video i'm going to show you a quick  and easy way to use free public domain images   available on the internet to create your own  coloring books to self-publish on the amazon kdp   platform and hopefully make sales and hopefully  make money so if you're interested in becoming a   self-publisher publishing books on amazon making  money online by creating and selling books then   follow along as i show you how to make these types  of books now if you've not been to this channel   before then welcome my name is paul miles and  i do videos on how to make it keep it and great   and that's your money i'm talking about if you  do like videos like that then please do give it   a thumbs up hit the subscribe button and smash  that notification bell to receive notification   of when i produce more videos like this now  chlorine books they're extremely popular   on amazon and sell very well and make a lot of  publishers good money but one of the issues of   creating coloring books is creating the interiors  that's the pages that people actually color in now   this is obviously a lot easier if you're  an artist and can create these yourself   but if not you have to look at sort of trying to  outsource the creation of these interiors or use   other methods and that's what i'm going to show  you today and i'm going to show you a particular   type of coloring book where the images inside are  related to famous artists i'll show you an example   so if we go over to amazon i've just searched for  van gogh coloring book got 115 results so not a   huge amount of competition there and we can see  decent best-sellers ranks which means these books   sell very well now if we have a look at this book  in particular we can see what the interior looks   like and we've got these pages here which are  basically images of van gogh's paintings converted   into these black and white line drawings that  people can then color in and as i've said they're   very popular here's some more examples this is a  book of japanese prince now this picture here is a   famous print i'm sure many of you may have  seen before by an artist called hokusai   and if we just scroll down and have a look at  the sort of images that are in here this one's   actually quite a fancy book because it's got color  images inside but we can see we've got these black   and white lined images again for people to color  in now you can see if you just tilt your head   you can see there's another image there and here's  one one of my favorites and that's william morris   because these are quite easy to create in fact  these are one of the the easier ones to create   in terms of coloring books and if we just have  a look inside i'll click on one of the pages   and just enlarge that and you can see again  it's not exactly black and white so i hope you   can see it but we've got these black and white  line drawings so i'm going to show you how to   create the interior of one of these and show you  a really good way of creating a good-looking cover   for one of these books now where do we get our  images from well this site here at rawpixel.com   they have these public domain images which are  categorized by artists as we scroll down here   or categorized by subject area botanical animals  artists etc so these are in the public domain if   we go to wikipedia it says a public mind consists  of creative work with no exclusive intellectual   property rights however and this is my disclaimer  i'm not a copyright or trademark lawyer so any   image that you use from an online source i suggest  you check that you do have the correct licensing   agreement for it and that means doing your own due  diligence a lot of people do ask me for advice can   i use this image can i use that image i can't give  advice on that it's actually part of the business   and it's part of something you must do yourself  when i get an image from a public domain site and   such sites can be things like pixabay and unsplash  i always run them through google image search   just to make sure that they're as well as no  evidence of any copyright or trademark on them   and in particular to make sure they're not listed  on sites like istock or bigstockphoto that type   of thing where there's a license on a particular  image i always say if in doubt don't use it and if   in doubt and it's an image you really want to use  then i suggest consulting a copyright or trademark   lawyer but this site says they're all public  domain and normally images that don't have a   copyright were either created before there was  copyright law or the copyright has expired on   them so when you click on one of these images  and we'll go to this william morris page here   you can see we've got this huge selection now  these are particularly good images because   there's not many colours in them and they  have a good contrast which makes for good   black and white lined images for our colouring  pages and if we click on one of these here   we can see we've got our william morris sort  of pattern and over on the right hand side   there is information about the licensing if  we click on view license that takes us to this   creative commons page where it says no copyright  the person who associated work with this deed   has dedicated the work to the public domain by  waving all of his or her rights to the worldwide   whatever under copyright law as i said what i  normally do and i've done it in this case is   just take the image go to google image search  and just put the the image in there and i've   done that with this particular image and we  can see here there doesn't appear to be any   of these images listed on any um stock photo or  stock image sites so it looks like we're all good   to go with this in a bit i will show you another  very interesting website where you can get other   public domain images from but for the moment  we're going to download this particular image now   it says here read download because i've downloaded  it already and i normally just choose the web size   image we don't want loads and loads of pixels  to be dealing with so i've downloaded that now   the next step is we've got to convert this from  a raster image those are usually png and dot jpg   images and we need to turn it into a vector image  and that's a dot ai or dot eps or dot svg file now   if you have software like adobe illustrator you  can do that with the image trace function i've   already done a video in the past where i've  used that image trace function to create a   an image for a colouring book and i'll leave  a link to that video in the description below   so if you've got adobe illustrator you can you  know follow the the method that i used in there   you can do image trace in inkscape as well now  we'll also need vector editing software now i'm   going to be using affinity designer you can use as  mentioned inkscape which is free gravit designer   the basic version is free or you can pay to  get the pro upgrade or there's vectornator   and that's another vector imaging software now  the issue with affinity designer i mean it's   fantastic it's probably one of the most versatile  pieces of software for creating books and it's a   one-off payment it's currently i think it's around  about the 50 or 60 dollar mark they were running a   special offer where it was half price um i don't  think that's the case anymore but still at that   price it's well worth the money the only issue is  they don't have an image trace function so we need   to use third-party software so we're going to use  vectorizer at vectorizer.io relatively inexpensive   for 10 credits that means you can upload 10 images  it says here it's two australian dollars eighty   which is about two us dollars and that would be  enough to do ten images you'd probably want to do   it you know in a coloring book you know probably  have like 20 to 30 images so it probably cost you   five to six dollars to do that which i think is  a good investment when you open vectorizer all   you need to do you can see i've already done it  here you just drag in the image and upload it it   uploads automatically and then it will convert  the image as we see here on the right hand side   into a vector image on the left is the raster  image on the right is the vector image and   you can do a lot of changes now the only thing i  suggest is just making sure you've got the photo   option here top left hand corner clicked on now  there's not many other changes you need to make   now we can from here enlarge our image what we  want is an image that looks good but with as few   colors as possible so depending on the type  of image you're going to need to experiment   a little and you can do this with the slider here  by changing the number of colors or over here on   the left hand side just clicking on the number of  colors so you could just have an image with two   colors and you can see what we've got is something  like this which is ideal for what we want to do   so i'm just going to go ahead and download that  and it will download it as a vector image a dot   svg image now i'm just going to drag that across  into affinity designer and here we have the image   now what we want to do is convert this into a  black and white lined image so i'm just going   to draw a bounding box around the whole of this  image i'm going to go over to the color tab top   right hand corner here click on the fill button  and again you're going to have the equivalent of   this in inkscape or adobe illustrator and then i'm  going to move this slider over to the right hand   side and you'll see our whole image disappears  that's because we've set the fill setting to   white then we click on the stroke button or stroke  box and then click on the stroke tab again top   right hand corner now what we want to do is make  our stroke appear and so we're going to just use   a slider to increase the width and lo and behold  our image appears like so and you can see already   we've got something that looks good that would be  ideal for people to colour in now this probably   is a little bit on the the busy side there's a  lot compressed there onto the one page so what   we're going to do next is command c or control c  to copy now i create all the interiors of my books   and i've done this for all of my books in keynote  or powerpoint now some of the more traditionalists   out there will say oh you can't possibly use that  to create the interior of a book you've got to   use professional software like adobe and design  or affinity publisher well that's nonsense i've   created all my books in keynote and powerpoint  that's the interiors and they're selling very   well and bringing in a nice income and it's very  simple to use and it's very difficult to make any   errors and it's got a very small learning curve so  anyway so we've copied this image so we're going   to go over to keynote and command v or control  v just to paste now as i said there's probably   a lot there on one page so i'm going to  do just one corner just drag this like so   to make it bigger and i think that would look  perfect on our page now this is going to be an 8.5   by 11 inch book so this page actually has bleed  so the dimensions of the page would be off the   top of my head 8.625 by 11.25 so that'll be our  first page now we're going to go and create our   second page so if we go back to affinity designer  now i did download from raw pixel a couple of   other images and i'll show you what those were  now one was that image we saw on the cover of   that book by hockeyside now i left this not as  two colors but a few different colors here because   you'll find that with some images if you use too  few colors it'll just simplify the image too much   and you just have a few lines and a massive  white area so again you just need to experiment   with this setting here so you know the 24  colors 12 colors you just want to simplify it   so that it doesn't look too complicated and so for  the same for this left click on the mouse drag a   bounding box over the whole image go to color go  to fill move that over to white ignore these lines   here i don't know why those appear but that's okay  we'll soon change those click on our stroke button   click on the stroke tab and then increase the  stroke width like so now i don't know why that   one is brown but we'll change the color of that to  black little rascal then there's another one there   so we'll just again change that to black like so  and there you can see again we've got a good image   that would be perfect for a coloring book now  before we send our image to powerpoint we're going   to need to rotate this through 90 degrees so we go  to layer transform rotate left reduce the size of   that don't worry about the way it looks at the  moment so just keep our bounding box around our   whole image command c ctrl c to copy go to keynote  and just paste and we can adjust the size of it to   fit our page like so you don't need all of it on  the page but that would look pretty good so that's   our page number two so now we're going to go back  to finity designer i'm going to drag in another   image many of you may recognize this chat it's  vangoff and again you can see i've reduced the   number of colors in vectorizer so again same old  process bounding box fill color to white stroke   increase the width you can see again that looks  pretty good command seek control c to copy keynote   third page paste and we can adjust the position of  this and just the size like so so now just as an   example here we've got our three pages now you  you'll want to spend a bit more time than than   i've done here this i'm just doing this quick for  the sake of this video and you may want to just do   a book of one particular artist like van gogh or  william morris or you could do a book of i don't   have famous paintings so now in keynote all we  need to do is click on file export to pdf i'll   send this to my download folder and then we'll  have a quick look at it and we can see here if i   drag it into place what it would look like so this  would be page one of our coloring book we've got   page two of our coloring book page three of our  coloring book we'd do that for the number of pages   we want in a book you know 40 or whatever 40 to 60  and then we'd upload that to the kdp platform as   our book as our pdf for the interior of the book  so now men said i'd mention one more site and this   is met museum.org and this is the metropolitan  museum in new york they have an online site   and they have public domain images and you can  see here on their own home page we've got this   open access artworks more than 375 000 high-res  images of public domain works so we click on that   and you can do a search for a particular artist  so we'll put in van gogh see what comes up and you   can see here you've got these images here that we  can use now some of these won't be suitable i mean   you know like this one here this one a bit dark  but certainly something like this may be suitable   and again it's got the public domain bit there  it tells you that you can 3d copy modify and   distribute this image even for commercial purposes  but i would still suggest checking on google image   search and doing your own due diligence because  you're ultimately responsible and so you could   download this image and then upload that to  vectorizer or load it into adobe illustrator   and convert it into a vector like i've shown you  and then create the interior of your coloring book   now if this has sparked your interest and inspired  you into creating colouring books then i suggest   watching this video next where again i show you  how to create the interiors for a coloring book to   publish on kdp amazon i hope you found the video  useful thank you very much for your time it's very   much appreciated do make sure you you click the  subscribe button and until next time and goodbye

Channel: Paul Marles

Views: 33,810

Keywords: kdp coloring books, kdp coloring book niche, kdp coloring book tutorial, kdp coloring book photoshop, kdp coloring book illustrator, kdp low content books, kdp low content publishing, kdp low content, how to make a coloring book, amazon kdp publishing, low content book publishing, amazon kdp coloring book, how to make money with my art, how to make money online, amazon kdp, kdp publishing, kdp tutorial, make money online, create coloring book kdp, paul marles

Id: Fdk6fibxUIo

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021