How to Add Doodles to Coloring Pages

I should’ve titled this post “How I Add Doodles to My Coloring Pages” although I think this will work for kids’ coloring pages that too often seem too basic for adults.

We like the nooks and crannies when we (adults) color. It’s all about the process, not necessarily the end result. That being said, after I shared my Color Your Own Printables kit I realized that some people (like me) might enjoy adding doodles and, thus, having more areas to color.

Of course you could doodle on a blank sheet of paper or a greeting card or even a bookmark because . . . it’s all about the process.

Here are my thoughts on doodling:

• Doodles don’t require coloring, although you can.
• There is no right or wrong way to doodle.
• Doodling is fun. If you get stressed or think you’ve made a mistake, you’re trying too hard.
• “Mistakes” when doodling are happy accidents that create new patterns.

For this doodling ‘tutorial’ I chose my geranium coloring page. If you look at the page you can see lots of space to add doodles. (sorry I didn’t add a border, it’s an 8-1/2 x 11″ sheet).

I wanted to doodle around the geraniums, creating a more complex frame and leaving the flowers to shine on their own. You could certainly go the other way and doodle inside the frame, around the blossoms and leaves. It’s just doodling and if you have the kit, you can print as many pages as you want.

My preferred pens for doodling – and all drawing – are Micron pigma pens. {affiliate link}

The patterns to use for doodling are unlimited. You can find loads of beautiful doodles on Pinterest and Google, but I still like to have a ‘cheat sheet’ in case my mind hits a block. I find that’s fairly common for me too.

Since we’re doing a doodled frame, I started with the spaces surrounding the geraniums, already on the coloring page.

I just filled the oval in with random patterns with no particular thought or symmetry. Yeah, if you’re an OCDish person like I am, doodling is fantastic to break through some of those “must-do” patterns.

Here’s where it gets fun . . . and not-so-pretty. Just hang in there and keep moving your pen. Trust me. The goal is to fill in the space between the oval frame and the edge of the paper. If you were doing a child’s coloring page, you might want to create your own frame first, although totally not necessary.

You create spaces large enough that you can separate and doodle in later. Of course you could just doodle away and not do all these steps. But then you wouldn’t be an OCDish person like me and you wouldn’t be reading a tutorial for doodling, you’d just be doing it.

I should mention that I switched from a .01 to a .08 (thicker) pen for the outside spaces. I used the .01 (finer) for the patterns inside the oval frame. You could certainly use other permanent markers as long as they are thin enough. Microns are just easy to find at craft stores and come in packages with a nice range of tips for drawing and doodling.

In Step A, I added additional loops around the original frame. This is a common way to make space for doodles. You can do it for letters or any shape and create nice spaces that aren’t huge.

In Step B, I connected to the outside edge of the paper. If you’ve ever done stained glass, that’s what it feels like. As I’ve said, you can doodle any way you want because there’s no right or wrong. This is just how I did it.

In Step C, I divided and added some large patterns to the spaces connected to the edge of the paper.

And in Step D, I started adding smaller doodles.

Doodle on Coloring Page

Here’s my final doodle on coloring page. I made it a printable if you’d rather just color and do your own doodles. Click on the photo or link to get the hi-resolution printable. It does have a half inch border for printing reasons, but you can just add your own doodles in that space if you’d like.

Some of the prettiest doodles aren’t colored at all, just filled in with black here and there. I only did a few spaces to give you an idea.

That’s because I’m all about the flowers. I mean, I drew them to color so I’m gonna color, alright? Btw, I used my Tombow Markers {affiliate link} for the geraniums. You can use them as regular markers or use the blending pen to soften the colors a bit. Absolutely love ’em!

This is only one idea have for my Color Your Own Printables. Which is why I called them “printables” rather than coloring pages. There are lots of options with them.

Next time I’ll show you how to blend colored pencils. Yep, regular ol’ colored pencils can be blended.

Have a great weekend!

Colleen

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