Hybrid Mini Coloring Book Tutorial

A tutorial for all you ladies who love to hybrid scrap! (And for those of you that haven’t tried it yet … this one is easy! Trust me!)

K, so for supplies, I used some digital stamps (specifically, Digital Stamps: Under Construction and Digital Stamps: Dinosaurs, both in my store at my Scrap Orchard) and some papers and elements from my kit Dino-RAWR 2.

(I apologize in advance that I don’t have a screenshot for every step … forgot. Oops!)

Hybrid Mini Coloring Book Tutorial

1. Create a new document, 7.5 inches wide by 10 inches tall. (This allows for 1/2 inch margins for printing … and allows for 8 pages to the coloring book per sheet.) We’ll come back to this document in a bit.

2. Create a new Photoshop document, 3.75 inches wide by 2.5 inches tall. (This is the size of the coloring page, and creating this document will help us to line up our pages in the large print document.) Fill the background with white (hex code #ffffff).

3. Open one of the doodles. Drag the doodle into your document — if you’re using Photoshop, be sure to hold CTRL+SHIFT while you drag so it is centered in your new document.

4. Right-click on the layer and choose Merge Visible. Drag you document into the large print document.

5. Go back to your small coloring page — undo the merge visible and delete the doodle. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each page of the coloring book.

6. In the small coloring page document, create a front cover and a back cover. (I used pieces from Dino-RAWR 2.) I chose to create everything digitally, but I could have printed out the pieces separately and attached them. (The reason I didn’t is because I knew my little boy would pull them off, so why bother with the extra effort? LOL!) Drag your covers into the large print document.

7. Once you have all your pages in your large print document, you can arrange them for printing. It helps if you turn on the snap (View > Snap). Then you can get everything to line up nicely. I ended up with 13 coloring pages, 1 “this book belongs to” page, a front cover, and a back cover.

8. Print your page(s). I chose to print on a heavier paper so we could color with markers or even use paint.

9. Trim off the 1/2 inch margins. Then cut the papers lengthwise (measure at 3.75 inches) and then cut apart each page (2.5 inches).

10. I used my Crop-o-dile to punch a hole in the bottom right corner. I picked this corner for two reasons: so I wouldn’t cut off any of the images, and because my son is left-handed.

11. Use a ribbon, string, book ring, or other element to fasten the pages together.

Here’s the finished project again. (Sorry the picture is washed out — too much flash, lol. I was in a hurry.)

And my son coloring.

If you give this a try, I’d love to see what you create!