an early Christmas gift for you

My school's chapter of NAHS (National Art Honor Society) always has a table at a yearly local art fair, and this year one of the things we sold was an "adult coloring book" (in quotation marks because it makes me laugh a little bit hearing people say that phrase-like they're trying to reassure themselves that it's okay for an adult to use a coloring book because it's an ADULT coloring book.) Apparently they have become really popular over the last year-Johanna Basford is the artist responsible for getting the trend going, and she's done some really beautiful work on them! Anyway, since we've already sold our books, I thought it would be okay to post my designs from the book (another girl from my design class made five other pages for the book we sold as well).

I don't know if anyone who reads this blog is into ("adult" ;)) coloring pages, but I figured they'll get more use here than languishing in the recesses of my flash drive. So if you'd like to try them out, or you have to do some babysitting of kids who might be interested in coloring something more intricate than your usual coloring book, you can download high quality PDFs of any of the pages from the Google Drive folder here. A little early Christmas present from me to you, I suppose:) If you do use any of them, I'd love to see a picture! :) Send them to me at somethingsplendidstudios@gmail.com or tag me on social media or whatever floats your boat! (If there is any interest, I might feature some of them on the blog.

I looked at a lot of old ironwork for this one-lots of gates and gratings and whatnot. I love the delicate curving shapes and all the curlicues and swirls.

Based on European and Scandinavian folk art! 

This one was inspired by Celtic designs. Creating the Gordian knot in Illustrator was a bit painful, but I'm quite pleased with the way this it turned out.

Mainly based off Art Nouveau-style shapes and curves. Again, I took some inspiration from the curves of ironwork-there are so many beautiful gates and doorways made in that era just begging to be made into a coloring book design :)

And this one comes mostly from Indian mandala designs. Look up Indian chalk mandalas-they will blow your mind. So intricate and lovely-and because they're made of chalk, they're incredibly temporary.

Enjoy, and merry early Christmas! :)