Before we made our first coloring book, I had never once auditioned a photograph. Photos happened, they went to the cloud, the end. Now I scroll through a holiday like a casting director. Some photos can carry a page. Some cannot.
A few books later, I can spot the difference from across the room, and since three separate friends have now asked, here is everything I know.
Your clearest photo makes
your best coloring page.
{Tweet that.}
The photos that turn into wonderful outlines share a few habits. They are bright and well lit, taken in daylight rather than in the romantic gloom of a restaurant. They have simple backgrounds, so the person or the sandcastle or the dog is the undisputed star of the frame. And they have edges you could trace with your finger. A face against the sky. A boat on flat water. An ice cream mid-drip.
A few rules of thumb from our kitchen table:
- Close-ups win. Faces, pets, small hands holding big shells. The closer the subject, the more satisfying the page is to color.
- Contrast is your friend. A red raincoat on a grey beach becomes a beautiful outline. Three kids in navy on a navy couch becomes abstract art.
- Skip the filters. That moody edit you loved on Instagram muddies the edges. The original, unfiltered photo almost always converts better.
- Blurry means blurry. If you have to squint at the photo, your child will have to squint at the page. Save the blurry ones for the family group chat.
My favourite trick, though, has nothing to do with lighting. Let the kids choose a few pages themselves. They will walk straight past your carefully composed sunset and pick the photo of the seagull committing crimes, and they will be right, because they will actually color it.
One warning from experience: choosing the photos takes longer than you expect, and it is the good kind of longer. You will sit down to pick twenty images and accidentally spend an evening back inside your own holiday. There are worse ways to lose a Tuesday night.
When you build a book with Outline Origins, you upload the photos and we redraw them as outlines, so the clearer the shot, the better the page. Dig out your brightest ones and see what your holiday looks like in line form.
